(One, two, three, four, five…)

I have a personal vendetta against the guy who drilled all the holes in the deck of our boat.

(…six, seven, eight, nine…)

I admit, a boat needs a lot of holes drilled in the deck. Our deck bristles with interesting hardware, much of it through-bolted. There are handrails and fairleads and stanchions and cleats and clutches and winches. But the guy I want to throttle is the one who drilled all the EXTRA holes in our boat.

I’m guessing that his boss gave him a template and a drill. But he was a ham-handed idiot. Maybe it was his first day, and he’d never used a drill before. So he plopped the template down, and zippity-zap, lickety-split, he drilled a bunch of holes. Oops! In the wrong place!

(…ten, eleven, twelve…)

So he filled the holes in with some sort of goop. Not anything structural, but the paint would hide that on the top, and the headliners on the bottom. Maybe the boss knew, and maybe he didn’t. Then our ham-handed idiot put the template down again, in the right place, and drilled. Zzzzap! Oops! Crooked!? More non-structural goop, more drilling.

(…thirteen, fourteen, OK, I’ll stop now…)

No, I’m not counting. I just happened to notice that our two mast collars need a total of 16 bolt holes. So why did we find 24 extra, or 40 total holes, in the mast partners, a place that needs as much strength as possible?

The legacy of the ham-handed idiot continued when we took down the main cabin headliners. What’s this? A fairlead that needed three holes, but got six? And look, there’s a delaminated area! That’s because the rope clutches, which only needed 9 holes, had 18 — and the infamous “goop” that he put in the extra holes failed.

This is a reminder to all of us. When you screw up and take shortcuts, you can cause a lot of heartache down the road. And if your mistake is bad enough, someone might come after you later. They might sue you, or worse. What I have in mind for the ham-handed idiot is worse.

Here’s another bit of counting: Twenty-seven. That’s how long ago this criminal drilling happened. If he’s not yet retired, maybe I can track him down. Here’s what I would do: I’d drill a couple of holes in his head, and stick some bolts in, like Frankenstein. I’ll only miss-drill once or twice, but I’ve got a tube of 3M 5200 here. That should be good enough to keep his brains from leaking out. If he ever had any.