We (the ‘we’ here being people, humans, our species) know stuff. Lots of stuff. We have worked hard to gather and create knowledge. Math and science and engineering. How to make music. How to get to the moon. Languages. Art.
Our surety of knowledge is so intense that we know how others should live, better than they do themselves. This religion is better. This politician is better. The moon landings never happened. We become very attached to what we know. There is no such thing as evidence against what we know, those people are just wrong.
This morning, I learnt two things I thought I already knew:
- the right way to use our washing machine; and
- the right way to use our oven.
Earlier in the week our washing machine stopped working. We drained it manually and tried putting on a wash again. It stops again and we have to manually drain it again. Looking to find the problem we pulled the machine away from under the wall. In doing so discovering lots of little chips of concrete and stone dust. That doesn’t look right. Better call a repairman.
The repairman found the blockage in the machine very quickly. Nothing major. However, the bits of concrete were the indication that my wife and I weren’t using the washing machine correctly. It turns out there are concrete counter weights inside washing machines to stop the machine from moving and rattling while it’s doing a wash. If you put too heavy a load in the machine the counter weights get banged about. Concrete dust and chips under the machine being the result. The machine was a little worse for our misuse but didn’t need any repair.
I asked the repairman to have a look at our oven while he was there. The grill takes a long time to heat up. His verdict was that it would be more worthwhile to buy a new oven. Before he made his verdict though he asked some questions about how we used the oven and he ended up pointing out something we were doing wrong. This time nothing we did was causing damage. We were just using the wrong oven setting. We should have been using the setting the oven dial to the icon we thought was a cooling fan.
Both appliances have been in our home for ten years. I knew how to use them for ten years. Except it turns out I didn’t.
How much do you really know?