My word

It probably happens to you about once a month. I first noticed it after I fixed my oven. I had it again when I pulled a redundant network card out of my computer. The most recent example was when I filled in my tax return.

It is technishererfolgangabemangelsfrust. Or, if you translate it from the German: the frustration caused by having a sense of achievement for completing a technical task but being unable to boast about it because it is too boring.

It’s the sort of emotion that ought to have a word in English, but doesn’t. It doesn’t really have a word in German either, but the beauty of the language is that you can coin new words by lumping shorter ones together. (Schadenfreude [harm-joy] being the most obvious example.)

It comes as a huge comfort to me after the annoyance of that bloody oven. It died in the middle of a lunch party and remained broken for six months while I made half-hearted attempts to get an electrician to come round and fix it. It seemed fairly obvious what was wrong: the element was broken. No one wanted to turn up on an evening or weekend, so I took days off to wait for workmen to arrive. They didn’t. Eventually I found the part on the internet and pulled the oven out from the wall. Simple enough, I thought, but hang on, what are these screws with indentations in the shape of six-pointed stars?

The bastards at Bosch had tried to prevent anyone but their own technicians from opening the back of the oven by using Torx screws, which have a deliberately obscure indentation to deter the layman. Hah. I bought a Torx screwdriver and finished the job. I was so overjoyed that I baked my first and, to date, only Victoria sponge.

I wanted to crow about this gargantuan effort, but the faces of anyone I told would glaze over faster than sand at a nuclear test site. Technishererfolgangabemangelsfrust at its purest.