This isn’t the sort of statement that one should be making lightly, and I am not, so hear me out.
In the past month we have experienced a plethora of breakages in our household. First it was the toaster, then the microwave and now the vacuum cleaner. Each have ended their short lives in a plume of burnt electrics, their mechanical spirits wafting off to wherever these things go after they are spent too soon (and after their warranty has lapsed). We purchased all three of these items at the same shop on the same day, and considering their time of death has been so close to each other, something is definitely amiss. I duly carted each of their corpses to my workshop in the vain hope that my toolbox would be able to resuscitate some life back into their circuit boards. This was where the first problem surfaced. I couldn’t even open them up. I found that most of my tools were not suited for the job, with the usual Phillips or flat screw heads being replaced with star designs that I would assume are standard issue on something like the Millennium Falcon. Non-plussed, I have managed to source the correct socket bits from the local Hardware Store, but then found that the placement of said screws are always in some place inaccessible with a conventional spanner. I have therefore managed to make adaptations to some of the tools on my Victorinox Multitool which are thin enough to find their way towards the screws that I need to undo. All the while, I have the distinct impression that someone is deliberately trying to force me not to take this thing apart. Anyway, I managed to get to the inner working of all three appliances. I was even able to find the fault with each one as well. But when it came to sourcing new parts and fixing it, I found that despite being only a few years old, none of them are still being manufactured as their current model. There parts are obsolete and no longer available. They are rubbish. Throw away. I never had this problem when I was a teenager taking apart my parents’ broken appliances and putting them back together (with the satisfaction of their working again by the way). And this got me thinking – how did we get to the point where quality and longevity are no longer the cornerstone of a sales pitch or a product. Things are no longer built to work. They are made to look flashy and sophisticated as they take up their space on a shelf in the kitchen, but not to last longer than a few years. And it is not that the technology has changed. The microwave is the same basic design that we had in my parents’ house some twenty years ago. The only things that have changed are instead of a plastic finish that always became grubby with fingerprints or an analogue dial, there is now a pseudo-aluminium finish with a digital interface. Oh, and the fact that my parents had their microwave for about fifteen years when mine has barely made it to five. And everything seems to be like that. I challenge anyone to show me a mobile phone which works for longer than five years, or even a car that is still running smoothly once it has passed the 100 000 km mark. A case in point is the BMW which my mother recently acquired that has been in and out of the dealership with some computer defect that tells the engine it is bust when in actual fact it is running smoothly. I made the mistake of opening up the bonnet once to see why it wouldn’t start and I was greeted with what looked like the back of my fridge, not the top of an internal combustion engine. At least her car was built to last longer than my microwave, vacuum cleaner and toaster. She should get ten years out of it. Twelve if she really looks after it (and this witchcraft computer issue somehow resolves itself). When, as people, did we settle for such mediocrity? It wasn’t always like this. My father has a car at home which has been in the family for years. It still runs and it was built in 1904. When one opens up the bonnet, one can see exactly how the whole thing works. Conventional tools are used to fix it when it needs repairs (which is not often), and with some wire, conventional screwdrivers and a shifting spanner, most problems can be solved. Actually, I could repair almost anything on that car with my Victorinox Multitool. Given, the car hasn’t got seats that can recline to any conceivable angle, automatic windscreen wipers in case I forget how to activate them myself or traction control in case the damp leaves of suburbia catch me off guard. And I understand that those things are vitally important not only in a car, but as a means of sustaining human life. I really do. But I digress…my apologies. Getting back on track, I know that things will break, but my frustration is that I am deliberately roadblocked in being able to fix them. Because they are not meant to be fixed. Instead they are meant to be thrown away, most probably into some God-forsaken landfill on the periphery of my own suburban bubble. And I don’t understand how we are so invested in clean energy, eating less read meat and stopping climate change, but we don’t seem too bothered by the piles of junk that are created by things that are built to break and then are thrown away. At least I have my Victorinox Multitool, I guess. It is still as sharp as a quick-witted comment and I have had it since I was in Matric. So I guess there is some hope…
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ContentSome thoughts about things, sometimes philosophical, sometimes just musings. The world through my eyes... Archives
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