softer touch to a problem

Last week, I had a fair bit of trouble trying to fix one of my car door locks. One of those central locking systems when you lock the driver's side, all the doors in the car are supposed to lock. Only this time, one of the door lock refused to go back down everytime it popped up. I won't go into the details of how the mechanism in the door works to unlock (pull) and to lock (push) the car door but basically there is this little magnetically driven mechanism that does the unlocking and locking.

It wasn't the first time it has happened to me and all this while it simply involved tightening the screw that held that mechanism in place thinking everything that ages (especially a 24 year old car) will always have a bit of loose screws here and there, which simply requires a bit of tightening. Going on that mindset, I got home from work one evening, pulled out the mechanic portable light, opened up my toolbox and got down to removing the necessary door panels to see what was causing that little mechanism to not work.

Released a couple of screws, pulled out the panel, and I was now looking at the inside of my car door, observing the linkages that set the motion of locking and unlocking my car door to see where was the loose end to the entire mechanical loop. After about half an hour, I finally found out that a particular screw holding the mechanism wasn't holding its place and thus causing the door to be unable to locked itself everytime I used the central locking system. So, when there is screw not holding something in place and you are holding a screw driver, the most logical thing to do would be to tigthening the screw right? So that's what I did, I grabbed my screw driver and tried tigthening the darn screw that was making me go through all this trouble!

So by the time I thought I had tightened the screw, I gave the system a shot and found it working. Satisfied, I put back all the panels, screwed everything back on and gave it another try. This time the door refused to lock itself again. After almost an hour by the time I had the door back in its original state. Fuming, I spent the next hour or so repeating the above steps only this time I realised I think I spoiled the screw. No matter how hard I tried to tighten the screw, it just wouldn't tighten. It pretty much became and infinite screw loose. It just kept turning, turning, turning and turning without tightening.

The next 15 minutes went to searching for a new screw in the pile of spares in my toolbox. Eventually, I found one of the right size and I took a deep breath, thought about it carefully and then tightened the screw but this time, I didn't screw it in too hard but sufficiently hard enough to hold the screw in place. Did a couple of testing and put everything back on the door and tested it again and WOALA! It worked.

Sweating after all the effort in the middle of the night (by the time I was done, it wasn't evening anymore), it dawned on me that not every problem or glitch can be fixed with just hard, punching solutions. Certain things can be dealt with with a little bit more delicate touches instead. Fixing a problem isn't like boxing where you just keeping throwing hard punches, and sometimes even in boxing a light punch can deal a killer blow if you hit your opponent in the right spot.