The joy of solving even a small problem

Just to contradict myself:

A few days ago, in my blog entry, The joy of solving a problem, I said:

Every day I solve one or more problems and it's nice to be able to do that but when you're faced with a potentially catastrophic problem, there is a special joy in diagnosing the problem and fixing it.

Well, maybe the "special joy" is due to the relief of the catastrophe not coming about.  But I fixed another thing over the week-end and I'm still elated about it. The door knobs on both our front and back doors were acting up. Like the picture shown here, they have a button you push in to lock the door. To unlock it from the inside, you're supposed to just turn the knob slightly and the button pops out and the door is unlocked - unless it's like our doors. Both of the doors have been getting harder and harder to unlock to the point that I was afraid someone was going to break one trying to get it to unlock.

So, among my many projects for the week-end, I resolved to get to the bottom of the problem. Getting the knob apart was not hard but when I looked at the mechanism, I was a little surprised. It looked a lot more complicated than I'd expected. I'd hoped to see something obvious but I didn't. Finally, in desperation, I tried putting a little oil on the moving parts. After oiling the wrong parts a few times, I found the right place. Both doors now unlock easily (from the inside only!) and I couldn't be happier.

So now I've got a new saying to go along with the one about fixing a potentially catastrophic problem: There is a continuing joy that comes from fixing something that you use many times every day. Even small things make a big difference when they are used a lot.