Dad Didn’t Need a Taskrabbit

The faucet in my kitchen sink loves to drool all over itself. If I’m not careful when shifting the handle back and forth, hosing down a pan, I’ll soon have a reservoir on the sink basin. The water laps against our cutting boards and adds to the stains on our laminate countertop. It drives me absolutely fucking crazy.

In these moments I’m liable to launch into a shameful brand of anthropomorphism. Already running late for work, forced to mop up the mess with a backpack on, I’ll get up and personal with the leaky faucet: This was all part of your plan, wasn’t it? You just live for my cortisol, don’t you, you little freak. A couple minutes later, walking to the subway, I’ll black back in, shake the experience away like an Etch-a-Sketch and move on. This has been going on for years. Only recently has it occurred to me that I could try to fix the faucet myself. 

My six-story pre-war in South Williamsburg has a small team of handymen who operate on an ad hoc basis. If something needs fixing in your unit, you can request the job via our landlord, whom I’ll call Craig. He’ll send his guys over at his leisure. One morning last fall, they banged on the door briefly, heavily — as I bellowed variations of “One sec!” from the shower — but they came in anyway. I greeted them with a towel around my waist, as they got to work on replacing the smoke detector. I mumbled my gratitude.

Sometimes they’ll conclude a specific task requires a new, expensive part. Craig will then launch a propaganda campaign, sending us a spray of emails explaining that we’re mistaken, the faucet doesn’t actually leak, we’re probably just pushing it with too much force. 

“It’s like opening a door,” he wrote to me. “You’ve gotta be gentle.” So: he won’t do it. Which matters, because I’m 95% sure I can’t do it. Like too many men born on this side of 1985, I have little control over these situations beyond disbursing my American dollars. I’m left to my own frustrations and dissociations — to googling Taskrabbit sign-up codes. 

If He Broke a Window He Could Fix It

When my dad was 17 he worked on a game farm in Sandwich, Massachusetts. It was a state job; they raised pheasant to sell to local gun clubs or private buyers. The birds lived in tight cages and had a habit of pecking at each other, which threatened their development. (They also sometimes pecked each other to death and ate the remains.) Dad and his peers were responsible for catching the birds, chopping off their beaks with a guillotine, then cauterizing the area. “Your arms would get scratched up like you wouldn’t believe,” he remembers. 

Among other tasks, workers emptied 50-pound bags of feed from trucks and mowed the farm. Sometimes the job got especially grisly: “If the brood got sick you’d have to go in there with a fire extinguisher.” Weed whacking meant sometimes eviscerating a rogue bird, invisible in the tall grass. But Dad remembers the job fondly. He had time to lift weights. Lunch was at 10:30 a.m. And Massachusetts took nothing from the $250 he pocketed each week. 

Since I was young, I’ve heard stories of my dad’s many misadventures and odd jobs. Born in a suburb of Boston in 1965, he grew up with three brothers, living the kind of rough-and-tumble childhood that would bring a proud tear to Jonathan Haidt’s eye. Dad and Co once had their own Sandlot caper — they lost a Carl Yastrzemski-signed ball after someone hit it into a sewer. Other times they were hitting those baseballs through windows in his narrow driveway, or wrestling throughout the house. 

“If something broke,” he says, “we had to try and fix it before Dad came home.” At a very young age, he learned how to rig up a broken bed platform with plywood from the garage. He knew how to go to the hardware store and ask them to cut a new window, then how to install it himself: carving out shards of the old broken window, laying putty, placing the new one, letting it harden. The basement in their house had a vice and a tool room. He’d race down there to build rockets, watch his dad fix a bike. In the summers his family went to Scusset Beach, and as young as 10 or 11 he’d tinker with a small engine on a heavy boat, motoring around to check the lobster traps.

His family had one rule for their teenage boys: play a sport or get a job. So when he wasn’t playing soccer or tennis he was working at Burger King, rotating fries at McDonald’s, thatching a roof at the Christmas Tree Shop, cleaning bathrooms at campgrounds, staining and painting windows for his uncle, a real estate developer. He drove to these jobs at first in a white Ford Pinto, which he bought for a dollar. “It had trouble going uphill,” he says. “Sometimes the door wouldn’t work, so I’d climb in Dukes of Hazzard style.” Later on, he took the family’s 1972 Oldsmobile Vistacruiser before his dad could junk it. This one had its own issues: “I would take my foot off the gas if driving past a police officer because it was so loud.” 

Hearing my 61-year-old dad rattle off these details was a striking reminder that even the recent past is a foreign country. When I asked him how he got those cars working again, he cited a series of do-it-yourself automotive print manuals, under the name of Chilton, which were sold off 25 years ago. To “fix” the Oldsmobile he cut a Pepsi can and attached it with hose clamps to the rusted-out muffler. The trick got him through the summer. 

Blame XBOX Childhoods, College Admissions, Facebook

There’s a memorable scene in a forgettable movie, Leave the World Behind, where Ethan Hawke’s character, a media studies professor who only wears cabana shirts, has a mental breakdown over his ineptitude. It’s the apocalypse…and it’s pretty obvious he has nothing to offer. 

It goes without saying that there are millions of men still out there with hard-earned technical skills. But there’s clearly been some generational tectonic drift; as early as 15 years ago, 49% of men were admitting they couldn’t even unclog a toilet. 

How did we get here? A combination of factors: the rise of judgmental, risk-averse parenting, the hyperstructure of youth sports, the fact that 97% of boys now play video games, the downfall of Boy Scouts. As childhood got more competitive, there was less time or excuse for mastering inane technical skills that “probably wouldn’t matter” in the future — and may result in you slicing off a finger you’ll need for coding. (I was 15 when Time named Mark Zuckerberg “Person of the Year.”)

Not to mention: four-year higher education became a rite of passage in the decades between 1980 and 2010, and those college graduates moved straight to cities, where repairs are handled by paid strangers. 

I am not completely useless. I cook, vacuum, do laundry and keep the apartment organized. I can build furniture, though not intuitively, and it’s best if I’m alone in the house when I do so. I’m game to run any errand. Living in the city, I’m accustomed to visiting the grocery store at least five times a week.

From age eight or so, my parents expected me and my siblings to perform quotidian chores around the house. Sometimes we’d go above and beyond; I remember sanding and staining outdoor chairs, installing air conditioners, painting rooms, digging holes. (Once I woke up on a Saturday and Dad told me and my brother we were “moving a tree.” I was baffled. What could epitomize the powerlessness of childhood more than waking up to hear you’ll be moving a tree?) 

But such tricky, technical tasks were rare. While we (sort of) earned our keep, I never changed a tire or replaced an engine — let alone fixed a window I broke. 

At least my mechanical incapacity has always felt shared. From age 18 to 30 I lived with a dozen different guys in three different cities. The bar was truly on the floor (and in one bedroom, so were four framed prints a roommate never learned how to hang). If anything, the threat of apartment annihilation was a bigger theme: I know a group of well-educated men who turned the heat off before heading home for the holidays, believing they were saving money. During a deep freeze, their townhouse turned into an aquarium.

Skilled trades are on the up and up in the AI era. NPR has called Gen Z the “toolbelt generation,” as young people look for AI-insulated manual vocations. But I wonder if employment anxiety is the right fuel for a handiness comeback. (I also worry about these dexterous Chinese robot hands.) 

Convenience Has a Cost

Talking to my dad, I realized he never actually learned these things — and yet he also learned them all at once, like a toddler sponging up a multilingual household. Know-how was ingrained. It was cultural, at least in his corner of the world. Soldering a copper pipe was in a different technical lane than hanging a ceiling fan, but every job was basically the same. You grabbed a flashlight, took your time and leaned on the experiences you’d been tallying since you were a kid. If the task turned out to be truly beyond your capacities, everyone had access to a neighborhood fix-it guy. No shame in that. 

When I sent some early snippets of this essay to my Editor-in-Chief, James Jung, he wrote back: “What are dads without these stories?” I smiled reading that, then tried to make some sense of an ancillary feeling. A mix of pride and dismay, sprinkled with anemoia. Am I simply destined to be a different kind of dad? Can I glide on other fatherly bona fides — and rely on apps or AI to fill in the gaps? Is convenience worth the cost of shame? (The cost starting at a $100 half-naked thank you.) Or is there still time to fix the faucet? 

The other day I took a variety of photos of the leak and sent them to Claude, the Chilton of the 2020s. It identified my faucet’s make and model, diagnosed the issue and offered some solutions. One of which was a “potential five-minute fix.” Another suggested a 90-minute repair that could cost a couple-hundred dollars. I stared at the words for a while. Then I got up for a glass of water. I turned the faucet as gently as I could.