Nails

So, what is it with builders and nails? Nails used to have meaning; they used to have value, a few strategically placed nails could put a wall up that that you could hang an elephant from. Now, one can’t take a wall down without pulling out eleventy-zillion nails; nails at angles nails on top of nails, nails that go through a piece of wood into thin air and hold nothing. Many of the nails are bent and just pounded in not even going through the piece of wood they were meant to hold to some other piece of wood and around that nail will be hundreds of nails, apparently in an attempt to ensure that something is holding the piece of wood to where is needs to be.

I would blame it on that use of nail guns, which can in the blink of an eye deliver up to 600 nails a minute into any unsuspecting piece of wood, rendering it unfit to even hold the nails. No, this trend seems to have started before the nail gun became ubiquitous. It is, though certainly a more modern trend, possibly dating to the 90s when laws were changed that required homes to contain sufficient metal to prevent aliens from reading our minds.

My home, built in the seventies but with upgrades dating from the twenty-first century is one example. There is sufficient metal in the form of nails in some of the additions to block out even the most persistent of alien probes (anal, though might be an exception). In fact the nail-to-wood ratio in my house is such that even after all of the wood is gone, as in eaten by termites, there are still a sufficient number of nails to ensure that even a cockroach couldn’t crawl through without being impaled. Certainly, no radio waves can make it in or out, which explains why our cell phones barely work and the rise of cable companies, as it was no longer possible for radio waves to reach the antennas on top of our televisions, no matter how many acres of tin foil were put on them. Cable, which could penetrate the walls and bring in the signals were needed to breach the gauntlet of nails.

The advent of the pneumatically driven air gun has just exacerbated the problem. Now, even the most incompetent of nailers, those that spend more time smashing their fingers with the hammer than actually putting a nail into the wood, can, within a few minutes put so many nails into one spot using a nail gun that they have to drive back to the hardware store and buy another million rounds just to put up the next 2x4. Also, half the time that nail gun drives the nail so far through that wood that to get the nail out requires digging a few feet into the wall of the neighbor’s house.

One of the hazards that firemen face when a modern home burns down is the mass of molten metal that flows freely into the streets like lava, burning the tires of their trucks and if they aren’t careful the their boots. But, if something were to bring your house down around your ears, for example a magnitude 80 earthquake, then you could be assured of not having to suffer for days buried under a pile of rubble waiting for some rescue dog to find you. Chances are you would be already impaled by millions of 16 penny nails; those nails that were holding the vanity in your bathroom to the wall.