In 1996, my family and I moved to a small town in middle Tennessee. I had been working in this new town for a couple of months before we were able to relocate the whole family to our new town. I had been staying in a hotel while starting the new job. On the day we were moving into our new home, I didn’t see my family until I stopped off during my lunch break. We had movers doing our relocation which was a big help considering our move was over 4 hours away. We also had two very small children at the time.
I pulled up at the house and the moving van was in the driveway. I walked up the drive and found my wife. She was trying to coordinate the mover’s activities while keeping the kids entertained. As I walked into the house, she warned me about this one guy from the moving company that was obsessed with the assembly of our bed. There was a nut missing and he was concerned about putting the mattresses on without this being completely secured. I was ready for him when he saw me. He grabbed me and pulled me into the bedroom talking as fast as he could. “Hello, Mr. Wheeler, I’m glad you are here because I wanted to show you this. You see, this headboard is supposed to be secured with two nuts and we only have one. There was only one when we took it apart yesterday and you really need to have two nuts. Let me show you. Do you see this here? It only has one nut but that other one goes right there. This headboard really isn’t safe with out that other nut and the bed could fall apart, and I don’t want that to happen, but we didn’t do anything wrong and you really need to do something about this before we put the rest of the bed together.”
I guess I seemed only half interested when he finally stopped for a breath. I hadn’t leaned over to get a good look at the missing nut, but I could clearly see standing straight up that it was missing. While he had paused, I looked at the bed and said, “The headboard is on backwards.” This had caught him completely by surprise. He sees that it is on backwards and responds, “Oh man! I can’t believe I did that! I’ve never done that before. I’ve been moving furniture for a long time and I’ve never don’t that before. But let me show you the nut. You really need to do something about this nut because your bed us unsafe without that nut and I don’t want to leave without that nut on this bed. Oh, Man! I can’t believe I put that headboard on backwards! That never happened before! I don’t know how I did that! But come down here and look at where this nut goes. Do you see where this nut goes? It’s really important that you have that nut on this bed or it might fall apart. Man! I’ve never done that before! It’s been a long time since I’ve done that!”
Soon, I went back to work to leave supervising the movers to my wife. I know she was jealous. I planned to go to the hardware store on my way home from work that afternoon to pick up a nut for the bed. When I got home that evening, the headboard had been turned around. It’s funny how his story went from, “I’ve never done that before!” to “It’s been a long time since I’ve done that!”