RIVER CITY JOURNAL: GIVEN A PLACE TO STAND, I COULD REWIRE THE WORLD

* So it took the last half of the 20th century to learn a few simple mechancial tricks. Better to have lived and learned ...

As you all know by now, I'm not what you'd call mechanical.

I always think of this when the calendar brings us July just to remind us that January's ice storms aren't so bad after all.

But I've had a breakthrough in technology, and I'm dying to tell you about it.

First, let me demonstrate how inept I am when it comes to machines and gizmos.

When my wife and I were first married, we lived in the attic apartment of a three-story house.

That first July was a corker. We'd come home from work and climb the fire escape (yes, that's how you got to the attic apartment) to an inside stairway on the second floor. The higher we went, the hotter it got.

This was long before most homes had central air conditioning, and only a few had window units. We were lucky. We had an exhaust fan that bolted into an open window to draw air through the tiny apartment.

Unfortunately, the fan was wired to blow outside air into the apartment, and we wanted it the other way around.

Somewhere in my memory bank I recalled that switching the wires on the fan motor would cause the blades to rotate in the opposite direction.

(See. Right there you can detect a pretty good-sized deficit in the mechanical department.)

So, I put the fan on the floor and began to disassemble the fan motor. My entire tool inventory at the time consisted of a screwdriver with a bent shaft, a pair of pliers with one handle broken off and a huge crescent wrench designed to be used on Army tanks. I can honestly say I have never, ever used that wrench.

After exposing the guts of the fan motor, I was more than a little surprised to see not two wires, but three wires. At that point, my surgery on the motor became a guessing game: Which two wires should I switch?

I finally picked a blue one and a red one. I switched them, put the motor back together and installed the fan in the window.

Then the exciting moment came.

I turned on the fan. The entire house plunged into darkness. The electricity went off in the attic apartment, in the second-floor apartment and in the ground-floor apartment.

It's not easy finding your way down the attic stairs to the fire escape in the dark. But when I reached the ground floor, the two elderly women who occupied that apartment told me the fuse box was in the basement. No one had a flashlight. Or fuses.

After finding my way back to the attic apartment for a flashlight, my wife and I walked to the hardware store several blocks away (we didn't own a car) to buy fuses. The store clerk wanted to know what kind of fuse.

See. There you are. I didn't know there were "kinds" of fuses. I just thought there were fuses.

On our limited income, we couldn't guess about the fuse, nor could we afford to buy one of each in hopes one would do the trick.

So we guessed. Again.

We walked back to the house and installed the fuse. It worked.

But the fan didn't.

Eventually, my wife's mechanically minded brother rewired the fan motor, and we basked in the luxury of having hot air swoosh all around us as we endured the heat of the attic apartment.

That's living, folks.

Having just told you that story, it will come as no surprise to you that I am also technologically illiterate.

Sure. I use computers. I love computers. When they work.

When computers don't work, I long for a bent screwdriver and a pair of pliers with a broken handle. I think you could inflict a lot of pain on a balky computer with those if you wanted to.

But here's the good news. If you're still with me at this point, you're entitled to something less grim than life in an attic apartment.

Since I am of the male gender, I am a big fan of the remote control. As technology advances, there are more and more gizmos that can be operated with remote controls. It's not just a TV world any more.

The cable company kindly gave me an all-purpose remote control, but it doesn't work on some of my gizmos. So I went to the gizmo store and bought a remote control that operates a variety of gizmos. The package label said I could even use my old remotes to teach stuff to my new remote.

Now, here's the deal. I could go on an on about this bold, brave move on my part. I could give you a minute-by-minute account, but it would take hours. And I could share my frustration and annoyance and fits of man-sized disgust at not being able to follow simple instructions. You can tell I was taking this very seriously, because I read the instructions.

But I'm not going to bore you with all that. I'm simply going to say that it only took five days -- and nights -- to teach the new remote control to do everything I want it to do.

You have no idea what satisfaction that gives me. I made my wife listen to me crow about my victory over remote-control technology. She managed a smile, because she knows how easily the male ego can be bruised if you don't smile at exactly the right moment.

But, by gum, I did it. I deserve a plaque. And a special resolution full of whereases.

All I got was a good night's sleep for the first time in weeks.

Ah, technology. It's not so tough after all.

I'm giving serious thought to repairing the toaster.

Let's see. Should I unplug it before I start?

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.