Not Ready for the “Reeks and Wrecks”

Stuff Needs Fixing

The lamp is twelve years old. It was a gift from a family member because it went with our last house, an Arts & Crafts fairy-hut in a stately home neighborhood about two miles from where we now live. It does have a Dirk Van Erp vibe, the San Francisco Arts & Crafts metal worker that made those gorgeous bronze-base-mica-shaded lamps we could never afford. The metal-framed shade is made of oiled parchment and is showing its age.

The copper watering can is about six years old. The handle is soldered on in two places and I have resoldered it once at the base. I did a sloppy solder job, but held for a couple of years. The watering can was functional and still pretty if you didn’t examine the handle too closely.

Call Mr. Fix-it

I describe myself as a “fix-or-repair guy” as differentiated from a “throw-away-and-buy-new guy.” I am concerned about all the broken, but repairable stuff filling up landfills. In the words of the old Phil Ochs song “we’re filling up our world with garbage.”

I also get an unreasonable amount of satisfaction from fixing and reusing stuff, so sometimes I spend hours in my workshop fixing something that I could easily repurchase for under twenty dollars. Now in my retirement that is slightly less stupid than it was when I was making hundreds an hour as a consultant, but it still makes no financial sense.

My wife Billie is more practical than I am. She is researching online to replace the shade; I am struggling in my workshop to repair the watering can. It appears at this juncture that she will win this particular competition. I offered to strip the old shade down to the metal frame and put a reattach a covering of her choice. She has declined such assistance.

Mr. Fix-it fails again

I don’t blame her. Right now I am a fix-or-repair-guy who sucks at fixing things. My soldering skills have declined miserably. I made three attempts to resolder the handle, which detached at the top of the handle, while I was attempting to resolder the bottom. Just knowing about Murphy’s Law neither prevents nor mitigates its application.

In frustration, I decided to bolt the handle on. So I drilled a hole in both the top and the bottom of the watering can and attached the handle with some copper bolts I had. What could go wrong with this plan?

The top of the can is, of course, no problem. The watering can is never filled to the point where water would touch the hole. The bottom of the can enjoys no such advantage. Yes, it leaks. In fairness to my apparent failure to anticipate this outcome, I did mix some epoxy to fill around the hole under the head of the bolt and the handle. The watering can still leaks.

That’s the thing about water; it finds its way. The Taoists say, ”Faced with an obstacle become water.”

Now I have a watering can. . . with a hole and a bolt that is epoxied in. . . that still leaks.

My father passed away in 2000. I don’t have to close my eyes to see him shaking his head.

Handy Ray

My father was born in 1904. His father was a printer and so he was around machinery growing up. “There were no repair shops; you had to fix things yourself,” he told me.

My dad was what today you’d describe as “handy.” He fixed stuff and he fixed it the right way. I don’t think he ever used duct tape for anything but sealing the ducts of their forced-air heating system. My father and mother built their own house from plans they got at a lumber yard.

My parents took a freighter trip around the world in their late sixties. They were going to be gone for eight months and my father hatched the idea to rent the house while they traveled. His basement workshop was overstuffed and he asked me to help box things.

In a canvas roll were some tools I had never seen. “What’s this stuff?”

“Oh, that’s from Bessie.”

My father’s first automobile was a 1926 Ford Model T Tudor Sedan. Guys’ first cars are often an object of nostalgia and Bessie was no exception.

“That’s a wheel truer and that’s a spoke shave.” Ray was soon “lost in let’s remember.”

“The Model T wheels had metal rims with wooden spokes. Roads weren’t paved so if you hit a rock or a hole the wheel went out of true and maybe you broke a spoke or two. Well, you carried a spare, but you still had to fix the wheel.”

He went on to describe the process, as my expanding exasperation filled the basement. To my shame I think he threw away those tools based upon my youthful impatience. Even though he finally abandoned the rent-the-house-while-we’re-gone idea, the Bessie tools were gone when we cleaned out the house twenty years later.

What was left in the house? There were eight working electric motors stripped from old refrigerators and washing machines. He had out and replaced the brushes and rewired each.

An apple too far from the tree

He taught me many skills, but most have atrophied over the years. Some of the woodworking skills I’ve kept up, but  when I look at the dresser built by my great grandfather and chairs by my great, great grandfather, I realize I am not very good. Plumbing related skills like soldering are long gone. I worked on cars as a kid, but now I have idea what or how. I was shocked to find that my latest car doesn’t have a dipstick. “How do I check the oil?”

“The onboard computer will notify you if the car needs oil or it needs an oil change.”

I think about lost capabilities, the knowledge and skills of daily life that are no longer in demand that we’ve forgotten. When the Zombie Apocalypse comes, most of us will be truly screwed.

In the future

I read and watch a lot of apocalyptic science fiction and fantasy. Whenever I get concerned about the state of the world these stories seem to improve my mood. “At least there’s still electricity and people aren’t eating each other,” (yet).

Right now I’m reading Justin Cronin’s The Ferryman, about a world where renewable clones live in an island world called Prospera and Support Staff with service and maintenance skills live in poverty nearby in the Annex. The class struggle aspect of the book is a disturbing reminder of the inequity that exists in our world.

The book reminds me of a book I first read in high school. Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Player Piano, was written in 1952, the same year that my parents build their house. Vonnegut was a General Electric public relations manager who left the corporate world to write full-time.

Player Piano is set in a future world where all work is automated. A few engineers design and maintain factory machinery. Computers maintain all the data. (They are vacuum tube monstrosities, but ignore that.) We meet a young Paul Proteus, Vonnegut’s main character,  when he is a trainee engineer listening to his boss:

“If only it weren’t for the people, the goddamned people,” said Finnerty, “always getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren’t for them, earth would be an engineer’s paradise.” 

Engineers are high priests. Any non-engineering jobs with the large corporations are menial drivel waiting to be replaced by computers. Corporations fund a government sponsored minimal middle-class lifestyle. Everyone has big TVs and radar ranges and wall-to wall carpeting. It’s a bleak vision and everyone seems depressed, but the Vonnegut’s cynical humor makes it readable.

There are a few artists, writers, bartenders, and large standing army. Ten year olds take a test to see if they have the aptitude to become engineers. If you are not in that one percent of the population, you join the army or get shunted to the Reeks and Wrecks, the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps. Some of the Reeks and Wrecks scratch out a living replacing radio and TV tubes in their own repair shops, but most travel like tinkers moving from factory to factory fixing whatever they could fix with old hand tools.

Paul Proteus ponders industrial revolutions. The first “devalued muscle work, then came the second one that devalued routine mental work. I guess the third would be machines that devalue human thinking . . . the real brainwork. I hope I’m not around to see that.”

Prescient much, Kurt? I’m struck by the nearly straight line between the world Vonnegut satirized and today. Artificial Intelligence? Machine learning? We haven’t even mastered real  intelligence yet or understand how people learn and we’re teaching it to computers? What could go wrong with this plan?

A late adopter like me can get left behind quickly. Even little day-to-day fix-it skills deteriorate if not used. I guess I better start relearning to solder or I won’t even make the Reeks and Wrecks.

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