Friday, December 18, 2015

Repairs

Nothing runs forever. Everything requires maintenance. At some point, every appliance goes askew. This is, unfortunately, what occurred the last several months in our bungalow on North Talman Ave.

When the nightly news reports on the economy one of the benchmarks is “Durable Goods”. These, as opposed to consumables, are products that do not need to be replaced often. By often they mean every three years but for most of us ten years is more like it. Washers, dryers, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and cars are a few of the devices that are expected to make our lives easier while we toil away at work to make enough money to buy, repair, or replace them.

A reason I went into medicine was that I hate to see people (and things in general) die prematurely. I was one of those kids that took everything apart. Sometimes the things I took apart, at least in earlier days, never found their way back together. Through trial and error, I have become much better at fixing things, and have learned to restrain myself from “fixing” things that do not need fixing.

When people or machines malfunction, finding the correct information to diagnosis and then to repair them is critical. This is the philosophy behind medical school, internship, and residency. It is to instill the fundamental knowledge needed to find the correct information to base an opinion on.

One common complaint of medical students is why do they have to learn anatomy, physiology, microbiology, etc., etc. in such detail. My answer to that is, there is never a time when less knowledge is better than more knowledge. The brain is a sponge. It soaks up all the data presented to it and in the process alters its neural circuitry to create interconnections.

Many diagnoses seemed intuitive. I wondered to myself where did that come from. But I knew that at some time in the past I was exposed to a particular packet of information that my mind was able to draw upon when presented with a particular set of circumstances.

Louis Pasteur wrote: Fortune favors a prepared mind. In this, I am a firm believer. When it came to tests, I understood that if I knew the material it would not matter how squirrely the questions were, I would still pass. And so, when our home’s durable goods started to malfunction I decided to search for a cause.

In the past, the search itself constituted a major effort. Just to find the proper manual was a challenge and then to interpret it another. And if I was able to diagnosis the problem, purchasing the part needed was the next hurdle. Then along came the Internet. I have owned some obscure pieces of equipment: an old German motorcycle and a slightly younger Swedish sailboat to name two. Both presented challenges to fix in pre-internet times.

The first appliance to hiccup was the dryer. Now this dryer has put in its time, probably close to twenty years. It was even submerged under 18 inches of water when basement flooded and, after it dried out, struggled on for five years more. But finally, it stopped making the odd noises that it started making after the flood and died. It had had a good life and served us well, so we were prepared to let it go and be reincarnated into a toaster or a car door.

And since it was written off, the childhood trait of dismantling things to see how they work came calling. Charlotte had a better idea. She consulted The Great Google and to both our surprise found, for all practical purposes, an infinite number of references to this dryer. After reading and looking at diagrams, we started to watch YouTube videos.

There were three men, some better spoken than others, extolling on the diagnosis and repair of this dryer. We both decided it was the motor after the first timid attempt to repair it failed. Apart it came, and not without some difficulty, the motor extracted.

Chicago is blessed with a fine appliance parts store (Fullerton and Damen). To their amazement, they had one motor on the shelf. I jumped in the car, fought through a maze of traffic, and found myself with $160.00 invested in appliance parts.

I took a deep breath, watched the “put-it-back-together” videos again, and went in the basement. There it stood almost daring me to fix it. I plunged in. I cannot say there were no difficulties but in the end, I popped the dryer’s top into place satisfied that I had done all I could do.

At some point in the process, I had told Charlotte to please give me some space. In fact, I drew a line in the sand and demanded she stay behind it. I admit this was not charitable on my part, but in my fervor to revive the dryer, it seemed the reasonable thing to do.

Now was the time to plug it in. No sparks went flying. This was taken as a good omen. Then I depressed the start button and nothing happened. Not only had I not fixed it, wasted $160.00, and worse alienated my wife in the process; I was deflated. Then I heard a quiet voice — from behind the line in the sand — say, “Are you sure you reconnected the door’s safety switch.”

I had not and so I did, and it started. And this is when I thought of Rikyu’s statement, “One should abandon feelings of embarrassment and ask people questions: this is the keystone to being adept.” Chanoyu has taught me many things over my years of study but I never imagined it would affect my approach to repairing a durable good.

(Thanks to Gretchen Mittwer for her superb translation of Rikyu’s Hundred Verses.)

December 2015