Home Improvement and Frustration

I spent all of Sunday afternoon and evening trying to get our new dishwasher installed. Three connections: electrical, drain water, and hot water. Two of the three were simple and straight-forward; it was the hot water that just wouldn't co-operate. For reasons I don't understand, the connector at the end of the line just wouldn't catch on the threads of the dishwasher. Literally hours and hours of laying on my side getting more and more wet as I try to get these two parts to connect. By hour nine I had finally gotten it all together and was ready to test it.

The copper tube behind the washer had kinked as I was pushing the washer in. I would have to take it all apart to replace the kinked line. Sigh.

It is hard for me to express the level of despondency I felt as the day wore on. Just three connections, that's all and it seemed like very little was going my way. I couldn't find the right fitting,I damaged the fitting, the stores were all closed, the joint leaked, my wrench wouldn't fit... By dinner time, I was feeling completely demoralized. It was by the grace of God that I kept at it and was able to "finish" the project that evening. (Only to find that I wasn't finished at all.)

I think I have found the magic formula for personal demotivation: establish simple and achievable expectations and then fail to meet them in every way. Expectations are so key to getting me frustrated and (eventually) in despair. When I feel that I should be able to accomplish something, especially something that I think is simple, I lose hope when I fail to make rapid progress. Ironically, it is much harder to frustrate me with complex, long, or difficult tasks because I expect there to be trials along the way. Simple things made hard are aggravating.

This is one reason I switched positions at work. In my previous position, I would be assigned a simple task, usually a minor engineering change to some part of the aircraft. I would be excited because the technical part of the task was simple and I knew I could complete it quickly. And I would. Then would come the hours of paperwork necessary to get that change approved. Frustration in a bottle.

Ignorance of the details of a task also contribute. I look at the dishwasher and I see three things I need to do. In reality, there are twelve steps but I think the other nine are hardly worth mentioning; they're simple. When these nine tasks end up taking a lot longer than I expect, I get frustrated.

I think this home-ownership thing is going to be character building because I can see "simple" things like this are going to continue to pop-up. And they will probably appear simple until the little details start taking a lot more time than I would have guessed. I think I'm going to praying a lot more now and trying to remember that I'm not the one calling the shots and this is all in God's hands. Maybe I won't even get frustrated.