Friday, 10 March 2023
The Niggle Threshold
One of my less useful traits is putting up with very minor niggles I could easily fix. A recent example was my laptop mouse mat. For a number of years I put up with a cheap mat which tended to slip around as I moved the mouse.
To counteract this I acquired a habit of holding it still with my wrist but it was never satisfactory. The sensible solution would have been to buy a better mat which I recently did. Click, click on Amazon at that’s it. I'm using it now - the old one is in the bin.
The new mat is far superior to the old one. I doesn’t slip and it has a bump to support my wrist. Doesn’t make any difference to the blog posts, but why didn’t I buy it years ago? I don’t know, maybe the old one never quite breached my niggle threshold.
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10 comments:
I think the niggle threshold is highly flexible and depends on a subconscious list of priorities; getting round to sorting a minor problem - like the mouse mat - suggests that all the greater issues have been sorted (or one has given up and decided to live with them for the time being).
By coincidence, I’m currently waiting in for a delivery of materials to replace a built-in cupboard which has been annoying me for over twenty years but, this month, finally passed the niggle threshold. (We bought the house from a devotee of Barry Bucknell - every Victorian feature stripped out or boarded up and heavy sliding doors everywhere, including the wardrobes.)
"Barry Bucknell"
Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time! Wasn't he the guy who loved using one of those pump-action spiral ratchet screw drivers? I have vague memories of him slipping and making a dirty great gouge across the piece of furniture he was assembling...
A great deal of my life is like that. I think it has something to do with procrastination, and also with a perverse pride in fortitude. "I'll sort that later - but only if it's not too expensive, because I don't really need to!"
Macheath - an advantage of waiting for twenty years could be the satisfaction of ripping out then burning the old cupboard. It could be a kind of celebration.
Dave - I remember those pump-action spiral ratchet screw drivers. I have an idea that my father bought one but didn't get on with it. I think he threw it away.
Sam - I'm sure there is a perverse pride in fortitude and maybe something similar related to frugality - "I'll use it until it falls apart before buying a new one".
We had to take down our heavy sliding wardrobe doors: they were hurting my wife's shoulder. We hired a joiner and had him cut them up for bookshelves and install very light sliding wardrobe doors in their place. Money well spent.
dearieme - our wardrobe doors are light modern things. Not much to look at, but they are light and that was an advantage when had to take them off to do some work on the interior.
You still use mouse mats? Goodness! :)
James - I've tried other ways, but find the mouse easier than anything else.
‘... burning the old cupboard’?
Have you seen the price of timber these days? I think I’ll follow dearieme’s example and save it for future projects (always assuming I can find somewhere to store two 3’ x 6’ slabs.
Macheath - I spend a lot of time burning wood in the wood burner, so I probably see any spare wood as fuel.
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