Big-time Fixers.

The world is too full of “fixers.” I don't mean people who fix things, but rather people who say: “Let me fix it”; “Leave it to me”; and “Here! I'll show you how to do it.” Most dictators are “fixers in a big way.” All the “Nosey Parkers” of this trying world are “fixers,” whether they “fix” egg-beaters or empires.

The mark of the fixer is that he leaves everything he “fixes” in a fix. He is the owner of an addled ego which deludes him into the belief that anything he thinks he can do must be better than anything anybody else can do. Thus the trail of devastation left in the wake of the world's “fixers.” whether domestic or dynastic.

For ages the wild works of the big-time “fixer” have smeared the pages of history with the blood of innocent non-fixers and, until the earth is finally “fixed,” this urge to pull things to bits just to see if it is possible to put them together again, will keep popping up in the methylated mentality of the fuddled “fixer.” People who do things because they know from training and experience that they can do them are the antithesis of the “fixer.” The completed job is their only advertisement. But the way of the “fixer” is strewn with bits that won't fit.

Domestic Despoilers.

The household “fixer” can't make and break empires, but these are about the only things that are safe from his morbid machinations. We know his works because haven't most of us been household “fixers,” or domestic dabblers, ourselves—before we learnt that it is cheaper to get a plumber to fix the gas than a doctor to fix the result of our fixing the gas?

If there is one quality the household “fixer” has in plenty it is courage. He will tackle anything from the drainage system to a wristlet watch. Nothing that can blow up, fa” down, unwind or come unstuck, is safe from his misplaced ardour.

He can put up swinging bookshelves which are one-tenth bookshelves and nine-tenths swinging. He can assemble a radio receiving set which will do everything except receive and which looks like a cross between a boiler-house in Bedlam and the plan of a jam factory done by Heath Robinson in shorthand. He builds fowl houses which are so tottery on their pins that the hens lay scrambled eggs. His dog kennels are calculated to drive the best dog to the dogs. He can repair the sewing machine so that it goes—in leaps and bounds (one leap, two bounds, and one for his knob). The rooms he papers look like the hanging gardens of Babylon after a midnight garden-party thrown by the Babylonian Borstal boys. He mends taps so that they fail to flow through the faucet but squirt out through the top like Pohutu at play. If the caliphont won't run he “fixes” it so that it can't even walk. Locks and clocks are as putty in his hands. He can take a lock to pieces as prettily as a professional and if, when reassembled, it is no good for locking purposes, it makes a good sinker for deep-sea fishing. He can rejuvenate the grandfather clock so completely that it becomes infantilely inarticulate; but (household hint) old grandfather clocks which have been “mended” make handy meat safes.

The Day of Unrest.

Saturday is the “fixer's” big day (no, sir! handy men never play golf; they would rather stay home and “fix” golf clubs). In the suburbs you hear him with hammer and saw and axe and wrench adding a few more grey hairs to his wife's permanent wave.

How many brave feminine hearts miss a beat—even a whole octave—at the sound of those sinister syllables. “I'll fix it”? How many of the nearest and drearest of the fecund “fixer” wish that their husbands were just ordinary lazy dull duds like you and me? But the actual destruction and annihilation is not all. There is the weekly hunt for the fixer's tools, to add bitterness to the aloes in the cannubial cup of the “fixer's” bitter half.

As the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, so sounds the horrid cry of the maddened fixer.

“Where's that saw?” “Who's had the pincers?” “Find the axe!” Little children fly whimpering to their mother's skirts; the cat takes off for the rhododendrons; the dog moans beneath the wash tubs, the hair bristling on its neck; for the shadow of

“Rejuvenate the Grandfather Clock.”

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The saw is found under the wood pile where Willie has been sharpening it on the crowbar. The coalman has deposited half a ton of Westport on the pincers. The axe! Well, who ever had an axe that could be found? Little Lancelot (being too young to realise that “we men must stick together”) divulges that Willie has been engaged in erecting a fort, somewhere in Noman's Land, to resist the Italian invader. On such slender evidence is Willie taken away to “another place,” and wild cries testify to dirty deeds “down under.”

Even a spot of plumbing is powerless to deter a real he-man fixer. (Fixers, anyway, are only plumbers who have been cheated by Fate out of their birthright—or wrong).

No Fact is Stranger than Fixing.

No fact is stranger than fixing. Have you never heard a fixer's wife imploring him, with straws in her hair, to spare the plumbing? No? Well you have never seen the depths of despair plumbed. A ship's fireman sobbing for beer, a cow calling its calf, even a citizen paying his income tax, sound as glee songs compared with the passionate poignancy in the voice of the fixer's wife. But all in vain!

“Leave it to me,” says the fixer. “It's only an airchoke in the what'dyer'call'it; I just unscrew the thingamy, pull out the brass gadget and blow through it.”

Says his wife. “You know what happened last time we got an artichoke in the what'der'call'it. I can still see the mark on your head.”

But of course the fixer must fix. The dread virus clamours in his veins. Result: One doctor, one fire brigade, one plumber with mate!

The Fixer's Axe-iom.

The average “fixer” can do more damage with an axe than the average

An aerial which fell down on Grandpa.”

plumber can do with a whole kit of lethal weapons. With the axe the “fixer” has got Robinson Crusoe, George Washington and Bob Pretty whopped to a chip. As a one-tool operator there is nothing to beat him in the realms of destruction.

Watch him build a fowlhouse with only his trusty axe and a tin of nails. As casually as the man who mapped Melbourne he scratches out the ground plan with a stick. Then he puts in the piles. Then he lops off the joists with his axe to the required length. Then he finds that he has amputated too much. Then he extracts said piles and replants them. Then he finds the joists are too long; he slices off another length, but discovers that he has overdone it again. So he replants the piles and repeats the aforesaid processes until the fowlhouse, which originally was designed to hold twelve hens, has shrunk, until a china egg would feel crowded in it. So he decides that he won't build a fowlhouse, after all, and uses the joists for a wireless aerial, which falls down on grandpa. Of course there are husbands who can mend things that will stay mended, and make things which stay made; but they are so rare as to be practically museum pieces. There are few men who have entered upon the “sere and yellow” who cannot say:—

I was a fixer once,
But now have learnt the error of my ways,
And am content to be a sorry dunce,
Enjoying well my peaceful Saturdays.
No leaking pipe can tempt me with a wrench,
No locks nor clocks nor taps have power to call,
No more for me the fixer's little bench—
My trusty axe hangs rusting on the wall.
I've learnt my lesson—learnt it to the core,
And say with Edgar Allan—“Nevermore!”

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