the man tanti.
if i say man tantrum to anyone here i'm sure you'd know what i mean. the outpooring of frustration when working on something mechanical that just won't go right. whether you suffer from them yourself or just know someone, you'd still know what they are.
i started musing ove rthe man tanti today at work when trying to fix a single lounge seat with a recliner mech in it. it got to the point i had to go for a walk around the corner to the bakery to unwind of i would chuck my version one. to be honest mine are generally rather tame, i've never been one for throwing tools or throwing parts. i liked my tools too much to chuck them and whatever it was i knew i'd just end up making more work for myself. the same with kicking things, i have once or twice but it didn't take long to realize that it really hurt. all in all i'm sure that my tanti's are rather dull, but they do still happen on occasion.
i do wonder though why we do it, why do we express our frustration this way. i just thought that you could make a rather ammusing reality type tv show of candid footage of guys chucking man tanti's in their sheds, there have to be some funny styles out there. i'm sure you could go to any country in the world and hear the thud of knuckles on sheet metal followed by the sound of a dropped spanner on concrete then muttering and swearwords.
if i believed in faries i'd say that there has to be a bolt fairy that gets it's nourishment from mens pained frustrated muttering, it goes around seizing threads then comes back when you are trying to undo them and either makes them let go suddenly, makes the head twist off or makes the spanner slip. in this modern world of marketing i'm sure it could also make a pretty penny on retainer to the manifacturer of WD 40 or similar. (as an aside i have tried "freeze and release" and found it to be rather average)
my musings on the man tanti were far broader than this but i can't remember half of what i was thinking.... oh well.
Comments 5
Dunno about the bolt fairy - I had a visit from the tape measure fairy again the other day - was busy laying out the first posts for the garage - measuring up and digging holes. I could have swore that my tape was right there next to me one minute and then gone the next - Fisrt tI thought I'd left it on the roof, then I was convinced that I'd buried it with the dirt I'd dug out of the post holes. So after about 15 or 20 minutes of frantic digging through the piles of dirt - I admitted defeat and went to the garage to get my spare tape. I mourned to loss of the tape - as it was a nice silver stanley jobbie and helped renovate two houses and build lots of stuff.
Must admit, never really got frustrated about stuff like this enough to have a tanti, only thing that usually give me a tanti is people - I resided myself to the fat that losing my tape was just my own damn fault - lol
So on the way back from getting the replacement tape - lo and behold - there's the lost tape - next to the corrugated sheeting that i popped over to measure. I left it there when I decided to haul a sheet into position rather than measure it.
Tape measure fairy?
Short term memory loss?
I'll let someone else be the judge of that - lol
Must admit, never really got frustrated about stuff like this enough to have a tanti, only thing that usually give me a tanti is people - I resided myself to the fat that losing my tape was just my own damn fault - lol
So on the way back from getting the replacement tape - lo and behold - there's the lost tape - next to the corrugated sheeting that i popped over to measure. I left it there when I decided to haul a sheet into position rather than measure it.
Tape measure fairy?
Short term memory loss?
I'll let someone else be the judge of that - lol
i'm glad i don't have your tape issues, that would really annoy me.
our bolt and tape issues could be from some variation of a gremlin. (the ww2 version not the 80's movie version).
i did a quick search on "gremlins" to check the ww2 time frame and it made me realize what a strange time it must have been. it highlights to me just how close people then still were to superstitions and stories of strange things. i'd imagine that a reasonable number of the combatants on both sides were told stories of strange happenings etc by grandparents or alike as children.
yes i do have an interest in the social history of the times of conflict in the 20th century, ww2 in particular.
as an even further aside, followed some of the links on the gremlin wikipedia page and skipped through the article on machine elves. i had a few friends who has two run ins with them... i'm so glad i avoided DMT.
our bolt and tape issues could be from some variation of a gremlin. (the ww2 version not the 80's movie version).
i did a quick search on "gremlins" to check the ww2 time frame and it made me realize what a strange time it must have been. it highlights to me just how close people then still were to superstitions and stories of strange things. i'd imagine that a reasonable number of the combatants on both sides were told stories of strange happenings etc by grandparents or alike as children.
yes i do have an interest in the social history of the times of conflict in the 20th century, ww2 in particular.
as an even further aside, followed some of the links on the gremlin wikipedia page and skipped through the article on machine elves. i had a few friends who has two run ins with them... i'm so glad i avoided DMT.
Nice bit of trivia that - never realised the origin of the term gremlin.
PS - I've got rid of the annoying nested comments.
i agree on that one, in some situations maybe, but here it is just annoying.