Part 8 - The Power of the Right Tools (and 50p)

My parents own a full acre of land, over half of it luscious green lawn sprinkled heavily with trees. There is a great Russian Olive that might remind you of the Whomping Willow from afar. Five different cone bearing species out of the spruce and pine families. A line of ash trees along the back deck. It was a great place to grow up.

My dad was the single income earner in our house for my entire childhood and most of my adolescence so there wasn’t money to pay landscapers to mind the yard. We prepped, mowed, maintained equipment, repaired sprinkler heads and water lines, and generally figured out what needed done and how to do it.

When we were starting a new job, my dad would always start with gathering the tools that were needed. “If you have the right tool, it’ll be easier,” he’d mutter as he searched. Of course putting things away where they belong would have cut short the searching. Alas, idiosyncrasies.

He’d go on to say “you gotta have light,” and “you gotta get your body in the right position.” Over and over again. That’s the funny thing about fundamentals. They are literally the things that come back around, regardless of context and details.

The relevant context and details here are that Addie keeps hounding me to include a particular tool here. It’s a navigation app she uses daily to navigate buses and trams to make her way to work, and wherever else she needs to go. She insists visitors must download it before they come. Now you know.

I’ve had a pair of experiences that could have been solved with another small, almost worthless tool.

Public restrooms in most of continental Europe are clean, and generally pleasant. They also cost 50p. No 50p, no potty for you. This is a huge bummer when you’ve stopped your shopping trip and schlepped an 8 minute walk out of the way to relieve yourself just to learn that you can’t until you solve another problem (which is hard to do when you’ve really got to go). Fortunately, for me, a kind soul took pity and spared a coin. But my experience would have been much better if I had had the right tool to begin with.

Let’s talk grocery shopping. In the US, there are these little computerized locks on shopping carts that prevent them from being rolled out of the parking lots where they belong. It seems to me this is a “solution” to homeless folks stealing carts to haul their property. The very real problem of homelessness exists here in continental Europe as well. So, too, does the cart theft problem. And there’s another “solution.”

Carts are all locked together at the front of the store. Rather, each cart is chained to the cart immediately ahead. To release the lock, guess what you need? 50p! Voila. You slide the 50p into your cart, it releases the lock, you shop, then return your cart. You wrap the chain around the handle of the cart in front and as you insert the lock into into its anchor, your coin is returned.

So, there you have it. My dad taught me that having the right tool for the job makes life much, much easier. And we’ve learned that that holds true living here in a small European city center where everyone needs both a transit app and a 50p coin.