Pushover
This story is about me. I just moved into my first home in February of this year. I live alone and am single. Earlier this month, I mowed my lawn for the first time.
I have never mowed a lawn before, but I’m thinking, how hard can it be? Prior to that, I had roped my brother into coming over and doing it for me, but this time I figured I need to actually learn.
The lawnmower is an old push mower of my dad’s that he had brought over about a month ago, and he quickly gave me the rundown on how to use it, but I was half paying attention, plus…it’s a lawnmower.
So anyway, I go to start it up, and it takes me at least 10 tries of pulling the cord as hard as I can with no luck until finally it fires up.
I then proceed to begin mowing, and I KNOW this thing is self-propelling—it says so right on it, but I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why it’s so hard to push.
The wheels aren’t locked or anything, so I just figure it’s a combination of me not having much upper body strength and my lawn having a lot of divots that prevented the mower from moving smoothly.
I finally finished, sweating like I had just finished seriously working out. Upon reflection, I’m still not convinced that the mower was self-propelling. So I’m sharing this story with friends and coworkers like “what did I do wrong,” and they’re all asking me about this lever, and I’m like yeah, obviously I had to hold the lever down or the motor kills.
Well, turns out there’s a SECOND lever that you have to squeeze in order to propel the lawnmower. I manually pushed that thing around my whole yard, divots, hills and all, and ended up with a blister on my thumb, and sweating profusely through my shirt.
So, at the age of 32, I have finally learned to use a lawnmower.