Last week I wrote about the small pleasures of replacing a garbage disposer. It was a quiet column about a quietly satisfying home repair. It wasn’t the easiest job in the world, but nothing went badly wrong. I observed that this was not the usual course of events for me.

However, in savoring my good fortune, I unwittingly opened myself up to retribution from the gods on Mount Do-it-yourself.

To put it bluntly, I tempted fate.

Fresh from my all-out victory under the kitchen sink, I moved on to the next task at hand: the typically uneventful weekly mow. A combination of travel and inclement weather had crowded out the previous week’s mowing, so the grass was high and thick, and, owing to the humidity, quite damp. Challenging conditions under the best of circumstances.

Adding a little pressure to the assignment, the forecast called for heavy rain that evening. I had a limited window for mowing.

I waited until late in the morning to give the dew a chance to dry out, then headed over to the mower shed. I hopped on the mower, started it up, and put it in reverse.

As I backed out of the shed, I noticed that the ride was bumpier than usual. For a moment, I worried that I’d failed to notice a new groundhog hole. But no, the problem was simpler than that: a flat tire.

No big deal, right? All I had to do was pump it up a little with the tire inflator I kept in the truck.

Unfortunately, the truck was a hundred miles away in Baltimore.

I had other options. The old compressor in the pole barn, for instance…which lacked the right air fitting.

I could always hit up one of my neighbors for a shot of compressed air…but no one was home.

Load the mower on the trailer and drive over to a gas station? Nope. No trailer.

Bicycle pump? Nope. Baltimore.

Fine, I thought. It’s time to replace my twenty-five-year-old compressor anyway.

So over the mountain we went, to the Home Depot in Carlisle, where I found a cheap  compressor, tailor-made for tire inflation. Keyword: cheap. Got it home, fired it up, filled the tank, and toted it over to the mower shed.

That’s when I discovered that the tire was really, really flat. So flat the tire had lost its bead. The wheel had to come off.

I hoisted the mower and started working on the nut that secured the axle. Wow, that thing was on tight.

Twenty minutes later, it was still on tight.

Did I mention that it was about ninety degrees Fahrenheit that afternoon? And just about a hundred percent humidity?

Eventually, with the help of a couple of very large wrenches, I got the wheel off. I took it back to the pole barn and started filling it with the new compressor. Which, strangely, started hissing all the time. That’s when I noticed that the brand-new hose had a brand-new leak.

I dealt with the hose, filled the tire, got the wheel back on its axle, and gently lowered the mower to the ground.

Precious hours of the afternoon had been sacrificed on the altar of that pesky tire, but it was with a sense of righteous accomplishment that I climbed on the mower and started her up.

Which is when I noticed that she was running rough.

I’d had some experience with that very sound. I had a sneaking suspicion that a mouse had built a nest in the engine, causing it to overheat and prefire. And I also knew that in order to clean a mouse nest out of the engine of a Hustler Fastrak, I’d need to remove the rear bumper and the engine cover, which would entail pulling out about twenty fasteners of all different shapes and sizes.

Mouse nest? Yup.

The next forty-five minutes were spent unbuttoning the overheated engine and cleaning it out.

While I was kneeling awkwardly next to the mower, trying not to scorch my fingers on the fasteners, I felt something land on my sweat-slick arm. I looked up.

It was a tiny black sweat bee. No big deal.

Until it stung me.

Apparently, I’m allergic to sweat bee stings. Not deadly allergic, but just enough to create sharp pain and swelling, followed by two weeks of intense itching, the kind where you wake up in the middle of the night to find your fingernails embedded deep in your own flesh.

I could go on. Suffice it to say that the lawn ultimately got mowed before the rain and that I obviously lived to tell the tale.

So what’s the moral of this story?

It’s that people like to read about the misfortune of others. Especially when there’s no real harm done, and the victim –in this case, me – has enough distance from the misfortune to see it in a humorous light.

We Americans lack a word for this very specific guilty pleasure, but the Germans have a good one we can borrow: Schadenfreude, which means “taking pleasure in the misfortune of others.”

The Japanese are familiar with the syndrome, too. They have a folk saying: “The misfortunes of others are the taste of honey.”

I won’t say that dealing with the mower that day gave me a great sense of satisfaction. I’ve learned my lesson about that.

But at least I got a column out of it.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 02 September 2010

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com