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GUMPTION TRAPS
"Gumption Trap" is a term invented by Robert Persig -- author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance -- surely one of the greatest books on Quality (but that's another topic) "Gumption" is "get up and go" and a Gumption Trap is something that just stops you in your tracks right in the middle of a project. .
The typical gumption trap for me is looking for, and not being able to find, a tool or a particular kind of part. When I was up in Colorado Springs, putting together a musical washboard to bring back to Belize, I decided that I would attach the cowbells with pop rivets. (Pop rivets are described as "another alternative to nuts and bolts.") So I went to several hardware stores in Colorado Springs, trying to find pop rivets that were long enuf to go thru the wood on the washboard. Well, they don't make them. I could have used nuts and bolts, but I was fixated on pop rivets. Finally, I looked at Dave Deeson's washboard, and he had fastened all of his cowbells on with hose clamps! So I used those.
At any rate, Belize is an incredible maze of gumption traps. If you make up your mind that you need some sort of fastener or material for a project, you could go nuts trying to find it. There are some pretty good hardware stores here, but -- for example -- the only place you can get pop rivets is in Chetumal (Mexico) or Belize City (100 miles south of here.)
The trick, then, is to convert all of your gumption traps into opportunities for innovation, and I have gotten pretty good at that. Let me give you some examples.
In order to use VoIP, (call the US over the internet) I need a headset. That's what they tell me. And I bought a headset in COS - little cheap thing with one earphone -- and the darn microphone quit working. So, what?? Throw it away and buy another one, huh? Well, I have all kinds of microphones here, for the band. So, now I have a mic stand with a boom, and a big mic that swings over in front of me when I want to make a call. It makes me look & feel like a DJ but it works. Sorta. The DSL I get from BTL is great on the download, but slow on the upload. So, people have trouble understanding me. If you have that setup on your computer, get SKYPE (skype.com) and we can chat with wonderful clarity.
In order to practice my steel guitar in the middle of the night, I need a set of headphones and I've got a good set (KOSS, $100) but I stepped on them in my bedroom in COS and broke them right at the left phone. I glued it once, using a big gob of epoxy, but that broke too. So -- do I get some more epoxy to fix it? I start thinking about bolting the thing together. If I had a strip of aluminum (or some kind of metal) I could drill holes in it, and pop rivet the two pieces together. First gumption trap. I can't find a piece of metal in the mess that is currently my shop. Ultimately, I fall out of the trap, and find a little blue plastic junction box with tabs on either end of it for nailing on to a stud. I break off one of the tabs, and I've got a square piece of plastic, about a quarter-inch thick, 1 1/2 inches long and 3/4 inch wide. It has holes in it, but they're not big enuf. I would use the drill press, but DRAT -- somebody has lost the Jacobs key that goes with it. (Well, it may be somewhere out in that mountain of stuff, but...) Miraculously, the drill that is stuck in the drill press is the right size to use for a couple of pop rivets. I hook up the drill press, and a light, and drill the blue plastic and matching holes in the headpiece and headphone. Now -- for some pop rivets. This one is perfect, but, OH NO, the other end requires a really long one. Wait -- a pop rivet is a substitute for a nut & bolt. Do it the other way. Ten minutes later, I've got my headphones on, and I'm practicing. Oh -- did I tell you, I did all of this stuff at one o'clock in the morning?
A standard gumption trap when working on a car is to lose a part, like a nut, bolt or washer, somewhere in or under the engine. In the states, you go to the hardware store and get another one. Lotsa luck in Belize. I'm working in the driveway, covered with grass, and I've lost a couple of parts in the grass, and found them by searching -- sometimes for a half-hour -- with one of those telescoping probes with the magnet on the end. That's a bailout, but it's a real gumption trap because it spoils your momentum, and "burns daylight" as John Wayne would say. So, finally I catch on to a trick that probably every good shade-tree mechanic already knew. I have a big flat square cardboard box -- actually contained a 3X3 plastic table -- and I put that under the truck, and now, when I drop something, it lands on that big square and I retrieve it and get back to work.
I'm getting in the spirit of things, and as time goes on, I will probably add some other traps and the way I circumvented them. I need to build a chipper to pulverize coconut husks for my hydroponics. I was envisioning a standard wood-chipper like you would buy in the states, but I'm envisioning a little one made from a hopper I have laying around and one of a dozen blender motors from defunct blenders. I'm going to mail this now, and when I put it on the website, I will add some pictures so you can visualize things a little better. And maybe you can tell me about gumption traps of your own!
Cheers,
Senor Reek
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