I got an object lesson in Occam’s Razor this morning. Through that little bit of self-education, I also got a lesson in getting what you allow.
Hop into the Wayback Machine with Mr. Peabody, his boy Sherman, and me as we jump back to a fine summer Saturday afternoon in 2016 at the Mister Car Wash on South Highland Drive in Sandy, Utah. As we observed from the Home Depot parking lot, the intrepid team saw me pull into one of the lanes and pull far enough up to hand the nice young lady at the kiosk my debit card through my open window and request “The Works”, shoving the center mounted shift lever into “Park”. As she handed the card back to me, I fumbled it and it fell to the pavement. Thinking I was Mr. Fantastic from the Fantastic Four, with my foot still on the brake, I cracked the door open to reach down and retrieve it. However, not being Mr. Fantastic, my foot came off the brake and a nanosecond later, I recognized my truck had begun to roll backwards toward the bollard mounted in front of the kiosk, beside the lane. Apparently, my phone was on the console in front of the shift lever and instead of going into “Park”, it had stopped short and clicked back into reverse.
Now, with my foot off the brake, and my chest firmly positioned into crush position, I opted to try to saddle back up and get my foot on the brake. While avoiding being trapped between the bollard and the inside of my truck door, I did not get on the brake fast enough to prevent the door catching on the bollard and springing it about 20 degrees or so beyond its maximum designed travel.
“What a total dumbass!” yelled Sherman.
“No need for profanity”, said Mr. Peabody. “I’m sure Mr. Smith understands his mistake.”
“Quite so,” I replied from the back seat of the Wayback Machine – which is much roomier than it appears on TV, by the way.
Embarrassed, blast from the past me pulled forward, yanked the door as near to closed as overstressed hinges allowed, apologized to the young attendant, and limped home to figure out next steps, which of course, included telling my wife and my insurance company, plus hunting for a body shop I could trust not to get the repair parts from the Pick-a-Part boneyard in Salt Lake City. You must understand that my truck was only three years old and spotless. Coming in second after my wife and in a three-way tie with my dogs and my guns, it was the thing I most prized.
About three weeks and $4200 dollars later, I got my restored truck back and the work was perfect – except for one thing. About a month later, I noticed that after being locked and then unlocked, the door handle was finicky to operate. You had to pull it out and let it snap back before it would open. No problem if it wasn’t locked.
Fast forward to 2023, and I have been putting up with that for seven years running. I had fallen into a rut of reminding myself “I’m going to get that fixed” after every event, but I finally got tired of explaining to the oil change guys how it worked. The rest of my family would forget, and the final straw was when my wife tried to get into it this weekend and just couldn’t make it work, so I figured it was finally bad enough to commit some time on YouTube looking for how to get the interior door panel off and figure out what is going on.
To be honest, I wasn’t worried about the tweaking the linkage, but I did worry about talking the panel off because some of them, without the cool body shop tools they use on the fasteners, can be a real bear to get off and back on without them looking like a cocaine-addled grizzly bear worked on them. Turns out, it was popping a couple plastic covers off, popping out the control module in the armrest, unplug four electrical connectors, take out four sheet metal screws, and lift and Bob’s your uncle, job is done. Buckling it up is just reversing the process.
So, I did.
Didn’t see any obvious issues, so I decided the mechanisms were binding and I broke out every DIYer’s favorite tool, WD-40. Tested it, it worked fine, reassembled it all expecting it to be fixed – but it wasn’t. It was then I realized it only stuck when it was locked and unlocked. I then disassembled everything, pulled my rolling work stool over and started studying the mechanism. If the door wasn’t closed and I manually tripped the latch, locking and unlocking didn’t cause the issue, so I started looking for things that could be different in the closed state vs. the open state and began to make sure everything was properly secured so they didn’t change position when the door was closed.
The very last thing I checked, with everything disassembled, of course, were the three little bolts that held the latch mechanism in place – which were accessible from the outside of the door with no disassembly required.
They were loose. Not loose loose, per se, they had been tightened just enough to pull them against the rubber washers but not tight enough to prevent the latch mechanism moving just a tiny bit. They had the appearance of being tight but were about ¾ of a turn to full tight and they had been that way since it came home from the body shop in 2016.
And I had just been putting up with something for seven years that could have been fixed in less than thirty seconds with a Torx screwdriver.
Two points I drew from this.
Of course, the “you get what you allow (or accept)” angle is obvious. I accepted sub-optimal performance because I invented a workaround that was sufficient to excuse me for taking seven years to diagnose and fix the problem (or getting an expert at the body shop to do it).
Secondly, I ignored Occam’s Razor that the simplest solution is often the right solution.
While I’m writing about my truck door, this story also applies to our current politics and the Biden Crime Family saga. Like I put up with my truck door, America has been putting up with Joe Biden for half a century, comfortable with the workarounds. Now the problem has begun to impact us daily, and yet many Americans can’t see that Biden has more than a few screws loose.
The Harvard Law grads who have climbed aboard the Deny and Grift Express in Congress are ignoring Friar Occam’s razor when faced with the overwhelming preponderance of evidence that Joe and the Biden clan are thick as thieves, and as a matter of fact, are actual thieves.
We need to stop and fix it. It’s not that hard. Joey’s got to go, and as a matter of fact, we cannot accept any Democrat in any position of power.
uh-huh.
Now Who is going to bell the cat?
Now that bells have been outlawed and are no longer produced,
Cats have taken over the village, and every door is a mousetrap.
It's a sad fact that as we get old(er) we tend to think of problems as harder to fix than they actually are. We look for complexity that maybe isn't there. Contrast this with a younger generation, in their optimistic naivete, that perhaps doesn't appreciate the complexity that IS there. We have a government that has evolved and metastasized to avoid accountability, turning relatively "easy" solutions into incredibly complex patchworks of laws, regulations and bureaucracy. Imagine an Intergovernmental Task Force assigned to fix your door latch - the result would have been "new rules" for car manufacturers that forced redesigns and added complexity. And your door still wouldn't work.