Something I've always found annoying about the fixing of certain kinds of problem – particularly those around the house – is that it's very hard to take pleasure in having done it, because my brain quickly forgets the problem was ever there.

For instance, many years ago I lived in a house where the door handle kept falling off one of the kitchen cupboards. Every time I tried to use the cupboard, the handle would come off in my hand, and in order to get the cupboard open I'd have to reinsert it and then twist it at an angle so that the loose screw would apply friction to the inside of the screw hole. Eventually I lost my patience and filled the screw hole with superglue, and then it was fine.

In my ideal world, I would have liked this action to be followed by an active sense of satisfaction at a job well done every time I used the cupboard and didn't have to fiddle with the door handle. This ongoing sense of satisfaction ought properly, it seems to me, to have lasted for a length of time commensurate with the length of time for which I'd had to put up with the problem.

But in fact, in only a day or so I had almost completely forgotten the problem had ever existed. I think this is because I'd always been bad at remembering about it anyway: it was rare that I'd go to that cupboard and remember to twist the handle at the angle that made it not fall off, and more usually I'd pull the handle in the normal way, swear, put it back on and then try again more carefully. So I very quickly reached the point where I'd reflexively yank the door open as if its handle had always worked fine, and not think twice about it. So that sense of satisfaction at having fixed the problem was completely gone.

(None of my housemates commented on the door handle having started working either, which I guessed was for the same reason.)

Of course, that doesn't mean it wasn't worth fixing the problem. It had previously irritated me every time, and afterwards it didn't. Clearly that bit of work with superglue did improve my life. But it didn't feel as if it had made my life better, since to know your life is better you have to remember that it was previously worse.

There's a whole class of household (and other) irritations that have this same property for me: as long as they're unfixed, they annoy me, but as soon as they're fixed I forget about them too quickly to derive any real satisfaction. It's as if such problems find one last way, with their metaphorical dying breath, to annoy me again.