I’ve just finished watching a fascinating three-part series called The Elon Musk Show.  I’ll admit, I started watching the series with the expectation that I was not going to like the eponymous billionaire; however, at the end of watching it, my primary emotion was a massive respect for the fact that he appears entirely genuine in his ambitions, the most impressive of which is to send a 100-person mission to Mars by 2029.

Oh, and I was left with one other over-riding sensation, too.  A personal sense that perhaps I had somewhat underachieved in my own life.

I’ll give you an example.  In the same time span that Elon Musk set up the world’s largest factory producing lithium-ion batteries for cars in the middle of the Nevada desert, managed to develop a reusable space rocket and land it back on Earth, had two children with Grimes, and has now purchased Twitter, I have been trying to get someone to fix the broken handle on one of my aluminium double glazed windows.  Can I get anyone to do the job?  No, I cannot.

“Don’t have the parts, mate.”

or

“That model’s no longer produced.”

or

“Can’t do anything with aluminium frames.”

I wonder now if I have been a little too passive in allowing this problem to fester.  I somehow feel that Elon Musk might have resolved the issue before now; would not have been so easily palmed off by the excuses I have received from the various workmen who have looked at it.  If Musk can assemble a team of engineers to create the SpaceX Starship Super Heavy, surely there is one guy out there in the world who knows how to fit a new cockspur handle on an aluminium framed window?

But, then, maybe that is the problem.  Elon Musk has snaffled all the top engineers.  There are none left in the rest of the world to fix all the minor little DIY faults, which habitually pop up around the average domestic household.  They are all in Hawthorne, California or Austin, Texas, or Pflugerville, Texas, or Reno, Nevada.

So, I’m asking Elon Musk: send back one guy.  Just one reliable chap from the team who can fix my window.  Even if it means delaying the mission to Mars by a couple of days.

© Simon Turner-Tree

Simon Turner-Tree must try harder.