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Yay possible competence on my part!
I could reasonably argue that, today, I fixed a furnace and a dishwasher. "Reasonably argue" because the furnace "fix" was trivial, and, indeed, basically routine, and because we still need to see if the dishwasher STAYS fixed. Still, I think it was a pretty good day.
I don't consider myself "handy." I just consider myself "accepting of the possibility of failure." Fixing stuff, when I do it, involves a lot of putting stuff halfway together, then realizing that one of the parts you've got lying around was supposed to go in earlier, and taking it all apart again and putting it back together again, and, on the third iteration, realizing that there was this OTHER part that was designed to come out FIRST that makes the whole "removing that section" much, much easier, and so forth.
I guess, in gaming terms, you'd count it as a situation where a person with a very low skill is allowed to keep rolling the dice over and over, attempt after attempt, and, so long as they don't critically fail and break something badly enough to require a competent person to come in, they can just keep going until it works. That's more or less how I think of it. I can call the professionals in FIRST, and have them do it, or I can try it myself first, and maybe I'll get it working, but if I'm in over my head, I can call them THEN. Honestly, so long as I don't lose pieces or force things into place, I'm not TOO likely to break stuff VERY worse than it would have been had I called them first. KINDA likely, but not VERY likely.
I don't consider myself "handy." I just consider myself "accepting of the possibility of failure." Fixing stuff, when I do it, involves a lot of putting stuff halfway together, then realizing that one of the parts you've got lying around was supposed to go in earlier, and taking it all apart again and putting it back together again, and, on the third iteration, realizing that there was this OTHER part that was designed to come out FIRST that makes the whole "removing that section" much, much easier, and so forth.
I guess, in gaming terms, you'd count it as a situation where a person with a very low skill is allowed to keep rolling the dice over and over, attempt after attempt, and, so long as they don't critically fail and break something badly enough to require a competent person to come in, they can just keep going until it works. That's more or less how I think of it. I can call the professionals in FIRST, and have them do it, or I can try it myself first, and maybe I'll get it working, but if I'm in over my head, I can call them THEN. Honestly, so long as I don't lose pieces or force things into place, I'm not TOO likely to break stuff VERY worse than it would have been had I called them first. KINDA likely, but not VERY likely.
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Come to think of it, the reason I DON'T think of the furnace as a fix is because I DIDN'T learn anything from it. I looked at it, it was EXACTLY like the state that it had been in at a previous time, I did exactly what I did then, and it started working in precisely the same way as it did before. No difference, no novelty, no learning. It WASN'T working, and then it WAS, but I didn't do anything interesting to make it that way, so I can't really think of it as fixing things.
Pulling apart the dishwasher, getting gunk out, and whacking the valves, on the other hand, WAS new and different and I didn't know what I was doing. Therefore, if it continues to work now, THAT I actually fixed.
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