We recently decided it was time to get a baby gate for the nursery door. After brief research, we ordered the Wirecutter’s recommended unit.
It arrived, we looked at the instructions, decided it would be mildly annoying and time-consuming to install, and hired a handyman we’d worked with before to mount it to the door (parenting really steeply shifts your willingness to trade money for time).
He did the install while I was out of the house at work. The moment I interacted with the gate, it became clear it annoyed me, and seemed shoddily designed and/or constructed. The latch was fiddly and hard to open in inconsistent ways – above and beyond the normal fiddliness I expect from any object that aims to be child-resistant and yet also usable by adults. It was a nuisance and an annoyance every time I entered or exited the nursery. I complained about it to Kate, but she thought it was fine and she didn’t have any complaint.
I noticed that a few bolts on it seemed to be loose. I got my toolbox, and tightened them down properly. I noticed another joint that had a bit of play, and was a bit out of alignment, so I loosened it, realigned it, and tightened it down properly.
The gate now no longer latches.
It turns out, our handyman had vertically misaligned the brackets screwed into the opposing sides of the doorframe, by perhaps ⅛ to ¼ of an inch. Then, he had managed to make the gate latch regardless, by leaving the other bolts just so slightly loose and/or out of true, exploiting just a little bit of play in the system in order to get it to latch – ⅛" is not a lot of distance to make up across the width of a door. By fixing the frustrating play I had noticed in the system, I broke his kludge, and the gate no longer functions to spec.
I intend to remove one of the brackets, and shift it by an eighth of an inch or so. That’s comparable to the diameter of the existing screw holes, so I expect I will first have to patch those with wood putty. Once they dry, I can re-align it, using the other part of the gate as a jig, and (carefully) drill new holes and re-hang it. This is all quite straightforward, but also mildly fiddly and annoying and time-consuming.
Here’s the thing: The gate worked. Kate hadn’t noticed anything wrong with it. I could, in principle, undo the fixes I have made, and continue using it that way.
But … I can’t/won’t. It’s wrong. It’s wrong, and it’s wrong in a way that would frustrate and annoys me, daily, for years, and which I know how to fix. I couldn’t avoid noticing the problem, and now that I understand it, I definitely can’t un-see it.
Here’s the other thing: Why? Why did I notice this? I really don’t think of myself as much of a woodworker, or one particularly handy, or mechanically inclined. I live in front of a computer all day. This isn’t a domain where I feel like I have particularly trained my perception or my judgment.
Some have described the skill or habit of noticing details like this, and caring, as “having taste.” I think of taste as something you cultivate, something learned from experience. I think of it as something like an aesthetic preference. I have, to some extent, taste in coffee. I can detect the differences between different roasters and different blends and different preparations, and I know what I like. I acquired that taste, gradually, over many years.
This gate thing, this doesn’t feel like that. It’s a different thing, one that seems to happen to me all the time: some object, some pattern of the built or social environment, some tool or practice, just appears to me, obviously and straightforwardly, from the very start, to be poorly executed and not fit for purpose. But no one around me seems to notice, or care. If they do notice, they shrug, acknowledge it as sub-par, and move on with their day; but instead, it infuriates me, distracts me, sticks in my mind, does not permit to interact with it without continually spending attention and cognitive effort trying to understand why it’s so bad, and how you would fix it.
Some people would say it’s a gift. It’s undoubtedly a sort of meta-skill that’s been useful to me, professionally; it drives a lot of my obsessive behavior around software engineering, and trying to build systems that are Good, Actually, and trying to deeply understand. I can’t and won’t deny that.
But also: Now the goddamn gate won’t latch. Now I am going to spend my time fixing it, even though it “worked just fine” before. Now I am going to do this thing and be grumpy about it, because I don’t know how else to ensure it gets fixed in a way that won’t annoy me.
Which is to say: I am attempting to write this note to convey to you that “having taste” or “being discerning;” it may be a blessing, but it’s also a goddamn curse.
