Most rational thinkers would agree that inside every useless home handyman is a skilled project manager trying to get out.
I have been a project manager for the past three years, as we reshaped our old sloping villa, and it has been a brutal time I would not wish on any man.
Yet still the jobs keep coming.
This last month has been a nightmare.
But nightmares are just food and drink to a skilled project manager, and I have been dancing across that millpond's stones like Nijinksy.
In the space of four weeks I have overseen a garden clearance, the cutting down of two desperately ugly conifers and subsequent planting of rhododendron and blossom trees; the filling of a skip with garden debris and sundry useless heavy objects; the tightening of a loose toilet seat in the new guest bathroom which our guests, including names you would recognise, have inexplicably refused to use; and the replacement of a halogen bulb in aforementioned guest bathroom from the top of a ladder.
I have never been happy with height.
So, came last Tuesday, and I felt the house was in tip-top shape.
However, a project manager's work is never done, and during a routine inspection of all bathroom and bedroom containers and bottles, I discovered the squirter tube thing in a bottle of Moschino Couture on the dressing-table had ceased to function.
Nothing stabs the craw of a project manager more fiercely than this, so I went straight to my perfume people in Wellington - Louise.
There was, after all, nearly $55 still sitting in the bottle, and in a recession, $55 is no laughing matter.
I had suggested to Louise that if I disassembled the entire thing, I could find the error, correct, and rebuild.
I have been there, my unlearned friend and I empathise, she wrote back.
After an unkind jab at my lack of 20/20 vision, vital for attempting such surgery, she said that even were I to disassemble the whole kaboodle and clear the squirter tube thing, it would still block again.
She also said in her experience, reassembled perfume bottles do not travel well in a woman's bag.
I mentioned, in jest, I could just saw the neck off the bottle and treat what was left as EDP instead of EDT.
Her silence on the latter comment suggested I was fishing in foreign waters, but she did admit to whanging the top off a few bottles in her time, at which point she said she just left the slowly evaporating liquid to infuse various key clothing drawers.
This was, she concluded, the best way to deal with the problem, as it brought about an excuse to buy more.
But I would no more whang the top off an exquisite Italian perfume bottle than donate my lungs to a worm, so I began careful surgical disassembly.
I tried to wrench the top off with some pliers, but, by hokey, these Moschino bottles are beautifully made, they should be next to the Ferrari at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
The top took a power of wrenching.
I assumed next I would just whoosh the squirter tube thing out of the bottle.
However, I must have used the cutting bit of the pliers not the gripping bit, as I cleaved the visible remains of the squirter tube thing right off.
I was left with something no bigger than the Michelangelo David's thingee.
Having destroyed the apparatus, I decided to hammer a thin nail through the squirter tube thing.
I should perhaps have done this first, as it cleared instantly.
This left a bottle of Moschino Couture which still produced a dribble of liquid if you pressed down on the mutilated top with the back of a teaspoon.
As a project manager, I saw this result as far from satisfactory.
But as a home handyman, I felt strangely jubilant.
