thinking outside the box
Before the advent of circuit boards, silicon chips and computerized everything, us do-it-yerselfers took no little pride in fixing our broken appliances, our busted stereos, our crippled cars and even our dysfunctional lives. Really didn’t have much choice given our fiscal challenges. The washing machine quits, you have to weigh that $50 service fee just to drive down here. Believe me, you’ll learn to diagnose a blown fuse or a broken fan belt yourself before you wait two days in your last clean underwear and then pay half the cost of a Maytag to keep the wringer washer working another six months.
My dryer quit this week. Nothing new there — it goes on strike regularly. But this time the little gizmo that held the blown fuse wouldn’t let go of the fuse. No big deal — I went on-line, googled up the part, found it … and discovered it cost more than that service fee I’m trying to save. Being a South Ender I balked at the rip-off price. No way was I paying $54 plus shipping for a plastic toy fuseholder. Next trip into town I scrounged the hardware store, found a reasonable facsimile and rewired the dryer to hold it …. And yeah, $5 later, I was fluffing up my dungarees.
Sometimes it pays to think outside the box, cornball as that expression is. I bought an extra hard drive for my computer — and oh yeah, I got one — but when it came it wouldn’t fit inside the Tower. A North Ender might send it back, see if there was a better fit. But like I said, we like to think outside the box, so I cut a slot with a hacksaw in the tower side and slid that new blank brain right in and left its frontal lobe sticking out for better ventilation. Sure, the missus shook her head sadly. But the salient point here is that it worked and MORE IMPORTANT BY FAR, the job was done.
The trick here is to show No Fear to these malfunctioning objects, even the ‘black boxes’. They sense fear quicker than a dog or a tax assessor. Open them up, grab a handful of wires, pull on em with authority, half the time they’ll respond positively when they realize unequivocally you’re the Boss. When my VCR ate a rental movie, I eviscerated the aggressive little unit and when it still refused to function, I made an example of it to its electronic brethren and tossed it two stories out into the driveway. I have put rocks through recalcitrant TV picture tubes and in one instance burned one alive, fully plugged in, begging like HAL in 2001—A Space Odyssey. Some machines are incapable of learning. You must be firm. You may even need to be ruthless. The worst mistake you can make is allowing one miscreant cyborg mutant monster to infect the rest. Give em an inch, they’ll grab half of cyberspace.
For those who think it’s a brave new world, one where nothing can be fixed or repaired, cowboy UP! Down here we aren’t going to be slaves to the machine. Even if we have to destroy every damn one ….!
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