There’s nothing left to fix

Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash

All our lives, we meander through plastic fields of impending garbage. Our thousand-dollar iPhones, our flat-screen TVs, our designer toasters, and of course, our fickle printers – all of it rapidly approaching the eternal ignominy of the trash heap.

Yeah, super original thought, I know. But this isn’t a cliché rant about the opulent waste left behind by the developed world. We all know that it’s easier and often cheaper just to replace something when it breaks, and that “back in my day, we built things to last.” That’s not my point here.

I like fixing things. Actually, the only reason I realized that I like to build things was through repairing things that were broken (often by me). But the newer and higher-tech a broken object, the less likely I can repair it myself, if it’s repairable at all.

When my parents’ car started running rough, I checked the dipstick and found that the engine had surreptitiously divested three-quarters of its oil. An hour and a trip to the gas station later, and I had disposed of the filthy remaining oil, and replaced it with clean new synthetic lubricant. I got thick, tar-like waste-oil in my hair, but it was an immensely satisfying experience to start the car back up and feel the engine running smoothly.

With more and more of my possessions, though, the repairs are less mechanical and more electrical. Realigning the brushes on either side of my jigsaw’s electric motor was a simple enough fix, but fixing my stereo amp by re-soldering the input selector was an exercise in fine motor control. Replacing the 3mm-long integrated circuit chip on the digital board of my dad’s home theatre amplifier depleted my annual supply of patience and dexterity, and I suspect it was the most complex piece of repair-work of which I am capable.

So when the motherboard of an old computer of mine died, I knew going in that it was a lost cause. In theory, a blown capacitor or fried voltage regulator module may be replaceable with my trusty soldering iron, but no such visible damage revealed itself. To the naked eye, the board looked brand new. There was nothing there to fix, nothing I could ever hope to tinker with. To repair the computer – which I opted not to do – would require the purchase of a new motherboard. From there, it’s a matter of reassembling the system – tedious, but no more challenging or satisfying than fitting together Ikea furniture.

I love computers. I love all the amazing things I can do with them, from typing up this blog post, to streaming videos from a distant server while it simultaneously dispenses thousands of other videos to thousands of other users. It’s incredible, and I can’t picture my life without the omnipresence of computers in their various forms. But I find it wholly disheartening to think that when my TV finally dies, nothing in my toolbox will be able to bring it back. There’s a distinct satisfaction in reassembling something that was formerly broken and finding that it works once more, and that satisfaction is getting harder to come by.