All hail Ikabai-Sital! Destroyer of worlds and mender of toilets

Don’t trust experts to fix anything

I Know A Bit About It – Shall I Take A Look

Ikabai-Sital is what skilled but unqualified amateurs and handymen say when you mention a problem you are having with your car/garden fence/front door/widget/toilet etc. It is an acronym for “I Know A Bit About It – Shall I Take A Look?”

When they say this, a voice inside your head (not the one telling you to kill everyone in your office, the other voice) screams out a warning that you should not under any circumstances permit this nutter to go anywhere near your car, fence, door, widget or toilet.

Don’t let him drip that 3-in-1 on that hinge! He’s not qualified! He’ll put our lives in danger! He might break the house! Call someone with the necessary Squeaky Door Correction certificate instead before the monstrous, multi-tentacled Ikabai-Sital destroys us all in his wake!

Your conscience then paints a picture in your mind of a 300-foot hole in the earth where your house used to be, leaving no trace except for a radioactive mushroom cloud that floats hideously across south-east London.

My experience is that if you let the Great Old One do his thing, you’ll probably be back up and running in a few minutes. If you listen to your conscience, however, you’ll spurn his offer of assistance and invite a “proper expert” to fix whatever it is you have broken.

And so begins the real nightmare as the expert turns up and demonstrates that his true expertise lies exclusively in the associated fields of Head-Shaking, Tutting and Teeth-Sucking.

Long before I became a home-owner, I would often see this power play in action at my workplace. The overwhelming view among the staff, including the sysadmin, was that the service company that had been contracted to install and maintain the network and shared office machines was useless. Rumour had it that its HR policy was exclusively to employ village idiots.

On the near-daily instances when something stopped working, we used to call the hotline and they would send over a clueless numpty to shake his head, tut-tut and suck his teeth. On one occasion, the numpty himself called the hotline to invite two more numpties to join him.

The three of them then stood around a laser printer, in a chorus of tutting and teeth-sucking, like an incongruous band of tie-wearing beat-boxers.

Once they had left the building, the expressionless sysadmin wandered over, yanked out a cable (not a toilet euphemism, this time), plugged it back in and gave me one of those cynical raised-eyebrows looks. Our connections to the printer duly sprang back to life. This made a huge impression on my younger self.

From that moment, I was the Ikabai-Sital for that printer. For reasons I can no longer recall, this developed into me being asked to twiddle and cajole lost server connections back into life within my little workgroup, even though I had absolutely no idea how those connections were made or even (and this dates it) what Token Ring was.

The one time I refused to assist a colleague was 6am on a Monday when, as usual, we arrived at work to find the server had committed seppuku as part of its regular weekend suicidal routine. Normally, we would have awaited the crusty old sysadmin to unlock the cabinet room and wake the server upon his arrival at 8am, but my counterpart in another part of the office was on deadline and in a state of panic.

Yes, I admitted, I have a key to the cabinet room. No, I refuse to touch anything in there. Why do I have the key, in that case? Er, because the sysadmin lets me keep my vodka in his fridge.

When I refused to help, he ... oh lordy lordy ... called the hotline to the experts.

The server eventually came back online shortly after lunch on Wednesday, by which time the experts had unnecessarily restored the server from a two-week-old backup and wiped all other versions. I was forced into the bizarre circumstance in which I felt obliged to apologise to the sysadmin for not interfering with the server in his absence.

Not to worry, he said, I hope you learned something and now let’s have a drink.

Now, some 20-plus years later, back at home and staring at my dismantled and abandoned downstairs dump station, it was as if I had learned nothing at all. Bloody experts. So I phoned the trustworthy handyman who’s been tidying my back garden (also not a toilet euphemism) to ask if he knows a reliable plumber to fix a broken bog.

Like a verbal masonic handshake, he responds with the mystic phrase by which the terrible beings such as he should be recognised by we mere mortals: “I know a bit about it – shall I take a look?”

Once on site, he confirms that there is no crack in the cistern and assures me the rubber washer I need is available for 60p at any DIY shop and proves it by nipping out to buy one there and then. Upon his return, he reassembles my log cabin within 45 minutes and it has never worked better, nor has it leaked since.

All hail the Ikabai-Sital, the fixer of things. Dread Shterot, the cutter of grass. Fear Cthulhu, the toilet-mender. They shall make their return, and a bloody good thing, too. ®

Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He appreciates that there is a fine line between an Ikabai-Sital and a random loon with a screwdriver and refuses to accept responsibility for readers who are unable to tell the difference. It ought to be possible to tell by looking in their eyes: the one who looks trustworthy, enthusiastic and earnest in his desire to help you is definitely the loon.

[* i.e. shitting in a bucket in the back garden.]