Notes from the Bench

A woman came in with a doorbell transformer off her own wall and asked me to make the bell ring softer, for a house with no noise allowed in it from the morning to the middle of the afternoon. Nothing was wrong with the box, and a bell has no volume to turn down, so what went home with her was a cut-off switch to fit by the bed.

A customer had said the woman weighed heavy, and the talk went round the town a day before her scale reached my bench. She wanted it checked, not defended, and the weights had an answer that ran the other way from the accusation.

A man brought in an old slide projector days before his anniversary, the lamp dead and the loaded tray jammed fast. The lamp and the changer were an afternoon's work. Proving them was the harder problem, because a projector is proved by what it throws, and the tray was forty years of somebody's life.

A man of about fifty brought in his mother's treadle sewing machine to be made ready to sell, and told me it had just stopped. The wear underneath said a hand had been inside it within the month, and the second field of a ticket takes the owner's words, not mine.