If “everybody” owns them, nobody owns them. Which means they don’t get maintained.
The Gulch has one really good ladder, and of course it does have an owner – Landlady bought it, Landlady owns it. But it gets used promiscuously at three different locations, and tends to stay wherever it landed last. So it spends a lot of time out in the weather, and doesn’t get cleaned or lubricated very often.
Despite in other ways being a veritable freedomista paradise, the Gulch is economically a sort of manorial system with me as the only resident villein. I pay my rent by finding ways to be useful. Also, since I’m here full-time I’m more likely to notice and have time to do the actual maintenance needed by things that spend too much time baking in the sun.
During building season I get more use out of Landlady’s ladder than anybody does, so it behooves me for more than one reason to keep it working. This isn’t the first – or for that matter the fifth – time it has gotten a lube job while visiting the Lair, but it occurred to me last week that the poor thing has never really been the same since what we might call the Summer of Stucco over at Ian’s Cave. Maybe, I reasoned, what it really needs is to get taken completely apart and cleaned of all that stucco on its sliding bits.
So that’s what we did this morning. I don’t know if it’ll fix everything that ails the ladder, but it can’t hurt. And it makes me feel better about things.
Good job. ladders are one of those thing that really need to be looked after because when they fail it usually means getting some first aid done or worse. Gravity is not our friend at the best of times and the higher one goes, the less of a friend gravity becomes.