DIY Time Warp

For some reason I’ve always been a DIY type of person.  Raised by my grandmother Johnson, I was taught to be independent and take care of things around the house.  The primary motivator back in those days was economics, not HGTV.  As an adult, the DIY complex has almost been a curse at times when I should’ve called a “fix-it guy” rather than doing it myself.  I’ve always tried to “build things” or “remodel things” or use “wire and bailing twine” to keep something operational.

During all of my projects, many a time I’ve dropped a screw, nut, or nail as I worked on a widget.  I’ve most always searched for those dropped objects, but many times those nuts, nails or screws simply vanished…never to be found.

Over the years I’ve often thought about where those objects disappeared to.  Now I know most of you are saying, they just fell in a crack, a hole, or bounced under a board.  But I’m not so sure the answer is that simple.  Most of you are probably aware of one of the universal laws a DIY person encounters regularly, the Law of Gravity:  Any tool, nut, bolt, screw, when dropped, will roll to the least accessible corner.  Well, this certainly happens, but this law only accounts for those objects that I look for and find.  The ones that simply vanish call for a much deeper analysis.

I’ve been building my theory since the original Star Trek series premiered on TV back in 1966.  That show certainly gave me some things to ponder.  Remember how the crew members would step into the “transporter room” and be “beamed” to another location, or “beamed back aboard” the Starship when they got in a tight fix on the planet below?  Moving objects through space…..could it be possible?  Then the “Back to the Future” movies and others such sci-fi stories planted the seeds of “slipping through a crack in today’s reality to another point in time.”

Then there are other times when I forget science and ponder the mysteries of my faith.  The Biblical concept of a physical body that also has an invisible soul provides even additional fodder for consideration.  Do body and soul reside in parallel universes, one physical and visible, the other spiritual and invisible?  

All these thoughts came full circle this past week as I began another DIY project in our sun room.  Plans were to put some bead board on the ceiling, so I began the prep work of moving furniture and taking down all the decorative elements in the room.  One step involved removing the ceiling fan before I began nailing the bead board strips to the ceiling.  This small mechanical exercise involved removing a few screws that held the fan blades to the fan motor and then removing the motor and electrical connections.  Pretty simple stuff, but boy did it help me solve my life-long wondering about what sometimes happens to screws when they are dropped and simply vanish.

 



Here I'm putting the fan back up after installing the bead board,
but this is about the same process as when I took screws out and one vanished.

The floor of the sun room is vinyl tile with an oval area rug in the center.  The fan hangs directly above the oval rug and a wicker coffee table is beneath the fan.  I’d removed two fan blades successful and captured all screws.  On the third blade I removed screw number one and had screw number two on the way out when I dropped it.  I looked down from my perch on the step ladder just in time to see the screw hit the oval rug and take a bounce under the coffee table.  No doubt about where this screw had landed I thought, so I stepped down from the ladder and looked under the coffee table.  No screw in sight.  I broadened my search, feeling with my hands and looking at every conceivable place the screw could have bounced and hidden.  No luck.    I picked up the oval carpet and shook it to see if I could dislodge a screw hiding some place in the weave.  No luck!  That shiny steel screw had completely vanished and was not to be found in that 12’ x 16’ sunroom space. 

 

It seemed impossible that the screw had simply vanished, but suddenly it hit me.  “I know what happened,” I said to my wife, “It fell through a time warp, you know, a crack in time.”  She laughed heartily, but didn’t offer any better explanation.  “You’ll find it sometime,” she said.  No chance of that I thought, it's in another time dimension and invisible from our time perspective.

After all these years of dropping screws, nuts and bolts, I finally saw this one hit the floor and bounce under the coffee table.  It made no sound as it hit the carpet, it simply bounced into a 'crack in time' and vanished.   Finally, after all these years, I'd seen one of these disappearing events with my own eyes; positive proof that physical objects can totally vanish and slip from real time into an invisible dimension.  I know, you are probably chuckling to yourself or even laughing out loud by now, but I doubt you’ve got a better analysis. 



About half way putting up the bead board, still no screw found.

My wife thought we'd find it as we worked, but after about a week's work in the sunroom; removing all the furniture, vaccuming, mopping, and checking all the baseboards and cracks, the fan screw is still missing.  It vanished!

So, laugh if you want, but I’ll rest in the belief that the proof will come someday.  When the time comes for me to slip through life’s time warp and step into a great new dimension of eternal time and space I’m sure I’ll find the evidence.  No doubt, one of the first things I’ll see in that new universe will be a vast room full of nuts, bolts, nails and screws. No doubt about it, I'll find the fan blade screw there among the many others in a giant pile of screws, nuts and nails that were dropped by a bunch of Do-It-Yourselfers when they were working on their projects.

 

Now if by chance you slip through the time warp before I do, the screw you need to look for looks like the one in the photo below.  See if you can figure how to slip it back through the time warp and I'll put it back in the fan.

 

 

Here is what it looks like.

It fits in a bracket like this one.



Now while we still have time on this side...…….let’s ramble!