Everybody’s saying that viewership of the Olympics will be down this year, but no one has a simple explanation. Instead, you hear a strange list of seemingly unrelated factors that may be distracting, irritating, confusing, or killing us — like a pandemic, alternative sports channels, folks insisting that everything we ever knew about the difference between males and females was wrong, controversial political statements made with the use of knees, fists, and turned heads, and vaccinations. Geez, and I thought sports was supposed to be about having fun.
It makes this old handyman long for the good old days when the Olympics seemed only to be about whether athletes were the best in their sports, whether they should be allowed to qualify as amateurs even though their living expenses were being paid, or whether the Commies were pumping their female athletes with male hormones. Moreover, I suspect that if we could sit down today with my toga-wearing counterpart from the time of the Ancient Olympics, that crotchety old handyman would agree with me, and tell you it’s only gone downhill from when it started as a small group of buck naked Greeks running around a track.
For better or worse, we at Fix St Louis and that ancient handyman have something in common, and we can’t help ourselves — we can’t see something that’s broken without trying to fix it. And my diagnosis is that today’s Olympic sports are so far removed from the experiences of our day-to-day lives that we can’t easily be drawn into them, fully appreciate how difficult they are, or be thrilled by watching someone execute them perfectly. In my daily travels through subdivisions, although I might not object, I’ve yet to see a woman answer the door in a leotard, then perform cartwheels through her house showing me what needs to be fixed. For that matter, I’ve yet to see a man answer the door, then dash out and run away as fast as he can. Although based on stories I hear everyday, that might be a totally appropriate response if I had the face of the last contractor he hired.
But if there’s one thing I know, it’s that many of you can relate to the home improvement work that we at Fix St Louis do. I know this because you often call us after you tried, then learned that you could not perform the work yourselves, and now had a new-found appreciation for us.
So as your humble correspondent, let me suggest the following, highly-relatable home repair tasks as replacements for some of the current Olympic sports, in the hope you might get as much of a thrill from watching Team Fix St Louis perform these feats, as Canadians do watching a round chunk of granite slowly slide down a sheet of ice while someone with a broom rapidly sweeps the floor in front of it.
Eliminate Balance Beam Event, Add “Attic Crawl”
Adding insulation to an attic is a much more challenging task than what you see in the Olympic balance beam event — a petite 14-year old girl with a boyish figure, born in SovietBreakawayRepublicStan, balancing on the thin edge of a wooden board.
Your attic consists of a series of even-narrower balance beams called “joists” that you’ll need to navigate to add insulation. And, if your foot happens to miss one of them, believe me, you won’t land on a cushy pad, then automatically bounce back up with a big smile on your face, like a petite 14-year-old girl from a breakaway Soviet republic, triumphantly throw your arms into the air, and fake a nailed landing. No, you may crash through the drywall attached to the bottom of those joists, which unfortunately also happens to be the ceiling of the level below, then hit that lower level floor with a thud. Oh, did I mention that those joists are sometimes visually hidden by insulation, and there’s typically insufficient room to stand-up in the attic, lest your head hit the slanted underside of the roof, that typically has sharp ends of nails sticking out?
What daredevils would be crazy enough to perform the contortion work required to add insulation to your attic? Team Fix St Louis, that’s who. We can also perform other audience-worthy tasks for you up in the attic, including adding ceiling lights/fans for the rooms below, adding a whole house fan to cool the living areas, adding an attic fan to cool the attic, replacing gable vents, and adding screening to those gable vents to keep pests out.
Eliminate High Dive Event, Add “Towering Ladder”
Sure it’s a little exciting to watch someone standing on the edge of a platform scarily high up. But instead of having it end with a small-as-possible splash, wouldn’t it be more exciting as an Olympic event to watch Team Fix St Louis, as long as we’re up there, do things you can’t or shouldn’t do because of the risk of falling, like clean your gutters, fix or wrap with aluminum your behind-the-gutter or angled gable-side fascia boards, or re-secure a high-up detaching siding panel?
Eliminate Weightlifting, Add “Concrete Haul”
Working with concrete on household repairs can be an extremely difficult and humiliating experience, providing homeowners with an unwelcome reminder of how strong they used to be, or at least how strong they THOUGHT they were back then. In an Olympic event that combines strength and speed, you could be awed as Team St Louis handymen carry as quickly as possible TWO 60 lb sacks of concrete at a time, one under each arm, from their trucks to the job site.
Like I said, by making the Olympic sports more relatable to our everyday lives, maybe the audiences will return. But to tell you the truth, none of us here at Fix St Louis really aspire to be worshipped Olympic celebrities. We just feel honored to perform home repair tasks for you that you justifiably might think would be crazy for you to try yourself.
So, let the games begin! Call Fix St Louis.
Dr Steve
Fix St Louis