Debating the lowdown on the latest shower-door craze

My buddies Mike and Bill swung by last week to pick me up for a round of golf—a happy surprise, because lately Mike’s life has been held hostage by home remodeling.

If you’ve ever had any work done on your house, you know what I mean: Rain kept the roofers away last week, so now they want to come today. Which means that the electrician will just get in the way if you don’t reschedule him. The plumber’s daughter announced suddenly that she’ll be getting married next weekend, so he’ll have to come rip up your pipes tomorrow instead of Saturday. The trucker strike is over, so the new cabinets that were stuck on a loading dock somewhere in Poughkeepsie are now standing at the end of your driveway and it looks like rain. Which means that the roofers will reschedule again.

That’s been Mike’s life over most of the summer, so when he called and said he had an unexpected day open with no tradesmen in sight, he picked up Bill and me and we hit the links.

I asked Mike how the new master bath came out, since the last time we golfed his cell phone rang on the second hole. His wife, Sandy, called to say she thought the tile pattern in the shower should be changed to match the counter instead of the floor, and the tile guy was here now and what did Mike think about it?

“Well, what did you think?” I asked him when he got off the phone.

“I told Sandy to decide what I think and I’d find out when I got home.”

Bill and I nodded. We have all been married to the same women for 45 years or so. We know the secret to a long, happy marriage.

So when I asked him how the shower stall came out, Mike just smiled. “Well, it isn’t done yet.”

“Not done? It’s been a few weeks, hasn’t it?”

He nodded. “The tiles are fine. Sandy tells me I love them. But now it’s the shower door. When it came in, it turns out that the holes drilled for the door handle were misplaced.”

He flashed that little smirk that said there was more to the story. With Mike, there’s always more to the story.

After an appropriate pause for dramatic effect, he bent over and held his hand level just above his shoe tops—an impressive achievement for guys our age. He said: “The holes were drilled so that the handle would be nine inches off the floor.”

The unsettling news caused me to triple-putt that hole. Mike took responsibility and gave me two mulligans to make up for it.

“Did they manufacture it at the factory that way?” I asked. “Maybe it was just a mechanical production-line glitch?” I remember years ago taking a tour of the R.J. Reynolds tobacco plant in North Carolina, and while I was there one of the cutting machines hiccupped. Before it could be shut down it had rolled a five-foot long Winston. Which would be great news if you promised your doctor you’d cut back to one or two smokes a day.

“Well, the door is manufactured at the factory without a handle,” Mike said. “They ship it and the installer drills the holes later, because they don’t know if you want it to be left-handed or right-handed.”

“Or even short-handed, I guess,” I said.

He nodded.

We speculated on what would cause an American shower-installation worker to think it was a good idea to mount a door handle nine inches from the floor. An Islamic extremist tricking us into bowing to Mecca? A fundamentalist evangelical interpreting scripture to read that cleanliness is next to Godliness only if it includes genuflection? Obamacare fine-print regulations requiring us to do deep knee-bends every morning if we want to keep our coverage? Pressure from aging Boomers who insist that just because you’ve fallen and can’t get up is no reason to pass up a hot shower? Or maybe just one more example of those irksome immigrants bringing their stupid metric system here to keep hard-working Americans stumbling over the difference between millimeters and inches?

We agreed that we’d been watching too many TV political debates.

Mike hit his next drive into the lake. I blamed the Supreme Court and gave him a couple mulligans in the name of checks and balances.

“So Sandy didn’t like that low-handle look?” I asked. “I would imagine they’d give you a great discount on the door. Just tell her it’s the latest thing on HGTV.”

“I didn’t ask,” he said.

“Didn’t ask the door guy, or didn’t ask Sandy?”

He didn’t answer right away, because Bill had teed up and was ready to drive. “The answer to your problem is obvious,” said Bill, who at well over six feet tall towers a full head over both Mike and me. “Just flip the door over and put the handle at the top.”

Longshanks skinned his drive over the fence and into the trees.

“Penalty stroke,” Mike and I chimed in unison.

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