Manual Labour and the Morris Technique

The market is still extremely overbought, as America continues to try and convince its populous that destroying the currency is a good idea, and I will be sitting on the sidelines for the foreseeable future.  A post regarding an amusing event in my personal life will have to suffice, this week (don't worry, there's no mention of Wal-Mart this time).

I very rarely engage in manual labour.  This is primarily due to three separate, yet equally important, reasons:

1) It's one of my greatest phobias.

2) My self-calculated hourly rate for such work is so incredibly high that I wouldn't be able to afford the invoice if I were to hire myself.

3) When engaged in manual labour, I invariably end up applying something called the Morris Technique.

The first two reasons are fairly self-explanatory, but the third deserves some elaboration.

The Morris Technique is an extremely powerful, genetic, evolutionary-perfected method of performing manual labour that has been passed down from generation to generation, over hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years.  Put simply, whenever a situation of difficulty presents itself during a manual labour event, one immediately casts aside all safe, relevant, and logical paths forward, and, instead, applies higher and higher degrees of rage-filled brute force until either immense, irreparable damage occurs to the object being worked on, or massive personal injury ensues.

A third outcome, which more or less compliments the previous two much like an aged cheese with a fine wine, occurs when one or more Morris' work on the same project together, and apply the technique in unison.  This outcome, naturally, is monumental physical violence between all parties present.

So, with all this firmly in mind, I awoke early Saturday morning with the spirited intention of changing the summer wheels and tires on our 2009 Toyota Matrix to their winter counterparts.

I began the task with a brisk trip to Canadian Tire at around 9am.  Once there, I located a reasonably priced 2-ton hydraulic jack, and also picked up a flashlight because, well, one can never have too many flashlights. Returning home triumphantly, I found the rear jacking point on the car, as indicated in the manual, and began raising the Matrix with the utmost of certainty.  When a thunderous crack echoed through the garage, I knew something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

It appears that for no reason that I can comprehend other than to save costs, the rear jacking point is a hollow structure made out of 1/4 inch thick sheet metal instead of solid steel.  Thus, the relatively small diameter head of the jack I had just proudly purchased managed to gently destroy its way through to the mysterious environment on the other side.

Pausing momentarily for several minutes of loud and creative profanity, I grabbed the Toyota-provided spare tire jack out of the trunk -- the kind you crank with both hands -- so that I could use the four individual jack points on the side of the car to do each wheel.  I began with the driver's side rear, which went well, and subsequently proceeded to the driver's side front.

After removing the front summer tire and mounting the winter one in its place, I began to notice something was amiss when the torque wrench refused to hit its limit on any of the lug nuts, after several minutes of tightening.  It was then that I saw that the hub centric on the summer wheel had not come off with the wheel and had instead fused itself onto the original hub, and stood tauntingly between me and victory like King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans at the Hot Gates stood against Xerxes. Following the rapid completion of more profane outbursts, I applied a derivative of the Morris Technique to the hub centric using the back of a cheap blade screwdriver and the lug wrench.  This failed to work.

I pulled the winter tire off, remounted the summer one, lowered the car, moved the jack to the rear, raised the back again, started removing the single tire I had managed to get on the rear driver's side, all while waiting on hold with Kal Tire.  After the store manager finished laughing when I had asked if I could get the car in that day, I inquired whether I could get the hub centric off the front hub myself, and he pointed out that I could try pouring boiling water on it.

So, after several additional and exciting verbal blasphemies, I re-tightened the winter tire on the rear driver's side, lowered the car, moved the jack back to the front, raised the front, removed the summer rim for the second time, and start pouring a volume of boiling water equivalent to the Red Sea on the hub.  Many minutes of Morris Technique-ing later, I managed to pry off the hub centric, and angrily smashed the winter tire on and worked violently to complete the remainder of the task as quickly and unsafely as possible.

The passenger's side went quite smoothly, and after raising and lowering the car a total of 7 times with Toyota's Fisher Price jack, I spent the remainder of the weekend in unbearable pain.

A job well done.