Let's write about learning to protect and preserve our "stuff"
Oh joy! Fixing something rather than throwing it away!
Grab your tools for the fight against planned obsolescence*.
This essay reminded me about the stand up comedian George Carlin's routine http://www.HaphazardStuff.com about "stuff". A video link is at the site here- just hit "skip ads". George Carlin's classic standup routine from his appearance at Comic Relief in 1986. (Farewell George 1937-2008)
On one bright June afternoon, in a hilly neighborhood of Worcester, Mass, I pulled up in front of Karen Curcio’s apartment house. I had driven an hour to find her, threading my way through backstreets.
The chair! What a chair — made of black-painted wood, with slender legs spun on a lathe, trimmed in gold. It reminded me of my grandparents’ furniture, rocking chairs and end tables topped with blue Wedgwood cracker jars. It was solid without being bulky, like an ancient Chinese scholar’s chair, like an heirloom that could last.
But the chair was broken. The pale lemon cane of its seat had snapped, and the octagonal tracery was unraveling. I don’t know what happened. It was that way when I found it at the town dump. “It just wears out sometimes,” Curcio said. Or someone with a big wallet in their back pocket takes a seat a few too many times — and pop! The delicate tension snaps. It happens to the best caning in the world.
The shattered cane ran in and out of more than a hundred holes, each the width of a kitchen skewer, around the rim of the seat, twining in and out of some of them three or four times. I could not bring myself to rip it out. But for Curcio, the act held no sacrilege. When she rips it out, it’s because she can put it back together.
Repairing what’s broken is far from mainstream at the moment. Many of us live in what’s been called a throwaway culture, in which everything from bedsheets to phones to furniture is given up for lost at the first sign of wear, with devastating environmental consequences. Part of the problem is that so much stuff is of such poor quality. Since the rise of mass production, manufacturers have purposely degraded their own products so consumers will have to buy replacements, a policy called planned obsolescence.
Even things that could last, things that could be useful for decades more, get swept up in our collective sense — carefully cultivated by companies that sell us stuff — that convenience trumps all.
Captive to consumerism: Peter Mui is another. When he was a child, his father gave him a broken alarm clock to work on. As a student at MIT, he noticed that the yard sales of Cambridge were littered with things that could be fixed, but weren’t. “It’s amazing how simple a lot of repair is,” says Mui, founder of the nonprofit FixIt Clinic, which since 2009 has hosted community events where volunteer fixers are matched with those in need of a repair. Fix a few vacuum cleaners and you’ll start to understand the common problems (a clog in a hose or filter is almost always the culprit when suction is bad, he says). He has seen many a hair dryer with a burnt-out thermal fuse roar to life again.
That faith should be more widespread, believes Mui, who has become an activist for repair. Activists are needed, because companies that make cars, electronics, and appliances, to name a few products, have a vested interest in making repair hard. Case in point: More than two years ago, voters in Massachusetts passed a law making it mandatory for car manufacturers to give local independent repair shops access to cars’ digital diagnostics, so that they can assess problems and make repairs. But, car industry groups have fought the bill, aiming to keep cars’ data the sole province of corporate dealerships. A recent federal court decision holds that carmakers will have to provide limited access, but this is a substantial weakening of the Massachusetts bill.
“There are numerous ways items are designed now to thwart repair and hold you captive to the manufacturer’s ecosystem,” Mui says. The methods can seem absurd: Printers often have sensors that make it impossible to use ink cartridges from any source except the manufacturer. “For a while,” he said, “Epson ink-jet printers had an internal counter where the printer would simply stop printing after a certain number of pages.” (In my opinion the HP printers have similar weird internal monitoring systems! I went through three expensive HP printers in two years.)
People who want to be able to care for their belongings — the “right to repair,” as this idea is known — will have to fight for it.
Persistence with a toaster: There are ways — despite the pervasive pressure to do otherwise — to take control. On a warm day in July, in the dim basement of a Jamaica Plain branch library, a long line of people bearing toasters, phones, and drills throngs around a table headed by Susan Cascino, the City of Boston’s head of recycling. At each table around the room sits a volunteer fixer, a person possessed of screwdrivers and know-how. This is the latest instantiation of Boston’s traveling FixIt Clinic, which will meet every few weeks into November. In my hands is a leather shoe whose seam has burst, and Cascino hands me off to Kathryn Flaherty, over whose table an elaborately bobbined sewing machine holds sway.
I don’t know how to sew leather, but Kathryn is not bothered in the least. She hauls out a tiny box filled with leather-sewing tools and shows me how to use them. She jokes that in her house, she fixes anything physical; her husband, a programmer, fixes software. On her finger is a steel ring, lined with cogs.
No sooner is my seam complete — a repair that had been sitting around the house for months, it takes me all of 10 minutes — than I stand up and see behind me a Cuisinart toaster. The stainless steel casing has been lifted off, and a man named Marc Benador is running his fingers over the metal rails underneath. There are two slots for toast, with levers to lower the bread. The lever on the left stays down when you push it, as you’d expect. The lever on the right does not, fumbling weakly at the bottom and sliding back up.
Something comes over me and I cannot leave this toaster alone. Debbie Benador, Marc’s wife, shines a flashlight into the slots from above. The innards of the toaster are a pinball machine of metal rods and plastic hooks, dotted with small green circuit boards. It’s possible that the hook on the lever and the hook at the base aren’t meeting, Marc suggests. He gently bends a rail to see if he can bring the hook closer to its mate. No cigar. He files down the base so it tilts inward a bit more. Still not catching.
While the toaster’s owner, Ben Dewey, runs home to get some compressed air — maybe crumbs are getting in the way? — I work the lever up and down. I barely notice when he returns because I am absorbed in aiming the flashlight so I can watch the hooks as they move through a gap in the stainless steel casing.
Up and down, up and down — there they go, these little pieces of plastic, made to break, made to force Dewey to go online, click a button to get a new one, forget this toaster ever existed. I feel suddenly a bit depressed; I’ve spent 45 minutes understanding the inside of a toaster, and for what?
Then I notice something. I can’t say exactly what, but I can see that the hooks are bumping against each other on the way down and sliding past each other on the way up. I keep moving the lever, jostling it ever so slightly, and — they catch. I release the lever and try again. They catch again. I look at Dewey and Marc, who are discussing something, and I point at the toaster. I am almost chagrined that I can’t make the lever do what we’ve been watching it do all morning — I don’t know how I did it, but I fixed it.
Dewey is delighted. So are the Benadors and Cascino, who hands Marc a bike bell bolted to a two-by-four: Every time something gets fixed, someone triumphantly rings the bell and the room cheers. So far this year, says Cascino, about 70 to 80 percent of objects brought into the FixIt Clinics have been repaired. Marc rings the bell for the Cuisinart toaster, and I walk out in a golden haze.
As I drive to Curcio’s house the next day, I realize that when I pick up the chair — its cane taut and beautiful again, whole — I’ll be able to tell her I did it, too. I fixed something!
Grab your tools for the fight against planned obsolescence*.
An echo essay published in The Boston Globe by Veronique Greenwood.
In my trunk was the reason. I lifted it out gingerly, making sure to keep it from bumping against the car. I carried the chair to the stoop where she waited.
The chair! What a chair — made of black-painted wood, with slender legs spun on a lathe, trimmed in gold. It reminded me of my grandparents’ furniture, rocking chairs and end tables topped with blue Wedgwood cracker jars. It was solid without being bulky, like an ancient Chinese scholar’s chair, like an heirloom that could last.
But the chair was broken. The pale lemon cane of its seat had snapped, and the octagonal tracery was unraveling. I don’t know what happened. It was that way when I found it at the town dump. “It just wears out sometimes,” Curcio said. Or someone with a big wallet in their back pocket takes a seat a few too many times — and pop! The delicate tension snaps. It happens to the best caning in the world.
The shattered cane ran in and out of more than a hundred holes, each the width of a kitchen skewer, around the rim of the seat, twining in and out of some of them three or four times. I could not bring myself to rip it out. But for Curcio, the act held no sacrilege. When she rips it out, it’s because she can put it back together.
Repairing what’s broken is far from mainstream at the moment. Many of us live in what’s been called a throwaway culture, in which everything from bedsheets to phones to furniture is given up for lost at the first sign of wear, with devastating environmental consequences. Part of the problem is that so much stuff is of such poor quality. Since the rise of mass production, manufacturers have purposely degraded their own products so consumers will have to buy replacements, a policy called planned obsolescence.
Even things that could last, things that could be useful for decades more, get swept up in our collective sense — carefully cultivated by companies that sell us stuff — that convenience trumps all.
How many times have you looked at something broken and felt relieved to toss it out, with the promise of a fresh one arriving in tomorrow’s mail?
It was not all that long ago that things were different. Curcio’s grandfather and father ran a chair factory in Gardiner, Mass. She learned to cane before she was 20 years old, and people would often call the factory and ask for repairs. She was game, and she’d have them bring the piece by so she could take a look. She made a career of waiting tables; she’s retired now. But she will still fix your chair. She’s part of an army of people who can look at something broken and see a way forward.
It was not all that long ago that things were different. Curcio’s grandfather and father ran a chair factory in Gardiner, Mass. She learned to cane before she was 20 years old, and people would often call the factory and ask for repairs. She was game, and she’d have them bring the piece by so she could take a look. She made a career of waiting tables; she’s retired now. But she will still fix your chair. She’s part of an army of people who can look at something broken and see a way forward.
Captive to consumerism: Peter Mui is another. When he was a child, his father gave him a broken alarm clock to work on. As a student at MIT, he noticed that the yard sales of Cambridge were littered with things that could be fixed, but weren’t. “It’s amazing how simple a lot of repair is,” says Mui, founder of the nonprofit FixIt Clinic, which since 2009 has hosted community events where volunteer fixers are matched with those in need of a repair. Fix a few vacuum cleaners and you’ll start to understand the common problems (a clog in a hose or filter is almost always the culprit when suction is bad, he says). He has seen many a hair dryer with a burnt-out thermal fuse roar to life again.
Fix a few more things, though, and you may start to feel uneasy at just how readily people throw away what they own.
To Mui, now a hardware and software engineer in Berkeley, Calif., throwaway culture encourages a devaluing of our own lives. It took hours to earn the money to buy something. If someone fails to even look for a repair, how little must that time mean, in the end?
In places where the memory of being able to afford less is fresher, solutions are more commonplace. In the town where I used to live in China, there was a street where most anything could be fixed. Electric scooter mechanics worked miracles while you waited. A seamstress with a heavy-duty sewing machine repaired tears in suitcases and drapes. In the middle of the street was the computer repair shop, whose owner maintained an elaborate collection of spare parts. He’d pop the bottom off my laptop and rummage about while eating dinner and chatting with his daughter. I was enchanted by his nonchalance, the ease with which he maneuvered the world of circuits and wires. The more I’ve thought about it since, the more I think that confidence is what unites people who fix things. They have faith that there is a way that doesn’t involve the garbage heap.
In places where the memory of being able to afford less is fresher, solutions are more commonplace. In the town where I used to live in China, there was a street where most anything could be fixed. Electric scooter mechanics worked miracles while you waited. A seamstress with a heavy-duty sewing machine repaired tears in suitcases and drapes. In the middle of the street was the computer repair shop, whose owner maintained an elaborate collection of spare parts. He’d pop the bottom off my laptop and rummage about while eating dinner and chatting with his daughter. I was enchanted by his nonchalance, the ease with which he maneuvered the world of circuits and wires. The more I’ve thought about it since, the more I think that confidence is what unites people who fix things. They have faith that there is a way that doesn’t involve the garbage heap.
“There are numerous ways items are designed now to thwart repair and hold you captive to the manufacturer’s ecosystem,” Mui says. The methods can seem absurd: Printers often have sensors that make it impossible to use ink cartridges from any source except the manufacturer. “For a while,” he said, “Epson ink-jet printers had an internal counter where the printer would simply stop printing after a certain number of pages.” (In my opinion the HP printers have similar weird internal monitoring systems! I went through three expensive HP printers in two years.)
People who want to be able to care for their belongings — the “right to repair,” as this idea is known — will have to fight for it.
Persistence with a toaster: There are ways — despite the pervasive pressure to do otherwise — to take control. On a warm day in July, in the dim basement of a Jamaica Plain branch library, a long line of people bearing toasters, phones, and drills throngs around a table headed by Susan Cascino, the City of Boston’s head of recycling. At each table around the room sits a volunteer fixer, a person possessed of screwdrivers and know-how. This is the latest instantiation of Boston’s traveling FixIt Clinic, which will meet every few weeks into November. In my hands is a leather shoe whose seam has burst, and Cascino hands me off to Kathryn Flaherty, over whose table an elaborately bobbined sewing machine holds sway.
I don’t know how to sew leather, but Kathryn is not bothered in the least. She hauls out a tiny box filled with leather-sewing tools and shows me how to use them. She jokes that in her house, she fixes anything physical; her husband, a programmer, fixes software. On her finger is a steel ring, lined with cogs.
No sooner is my seam complete — a repair that had been sitting around the house for months, it takes me all of 10 minutes — than I stand up and see behind me a Cuisinart toaster. The stainless steel casing has been lifted off, and a man named Marc Benador is running his fingers over the metal rails underneath. There are two slots for toast, with levers to lower the bread. The lever on the left stays down when you push it, as you’d expect. The lever on the right does not, fumbling weakly at the bottom and sliding back up.
Something comes over me and I cannot leave this toaster alone. Debbie Benador, Marc’s wife, shines a flashlight into the slots from above. The innards of the toaster are a pinball machine of metal rods and plastic hooks, dotted with small green circuit boards. It’s possible that the hook on the lever and the hook at the base aren’t meeting, Marc suggests. He gently bends a rail to see if he can bring the hook closer to its mate. No cigar. He files down the base so it tilts inward a bit more. Still not catching.
While the toaster’s owner, Ben Dewey, runs home to get some compressed air — maybe crumbs are getting in the way? — I work the lever up and down. I barely notice when he returns because I am absorbed in aiming the flashlight so I can watch the hooks as they move through a gap in the stainless steel casing.
Up and down, up and down — there they go, these little pieces of plastic, made to break, made to force Dewey to go online, click a button to get a new one, forget this toaster ever existed. I feel suddenly a bit depressed; I’ve spent 45 minutes understanding the inside of a toaster, and for what?
Then I notice something. I can’t say exactly what, but I can see that the hooks are bumping against each other on the way down and sliding past each other on the way up. I keep moving the lever, jostling it ever so slightly, and — they catch. I release the lever and try again. They catch again. I look at Dewey and Marc, who are discussing something, and I point at the toaster. I am almost chagrined that I can’t make the lever do what we’ve been watching it do all morning — I don’t know how I did it, but I fixed it.
Dewey is delighted. So are the Benadors and Cascino, who hands Marc a bike bell bolted to a two-by-four: Every time something gets fixed, someone triumphantly rings the bell and the room cheers. So far this year, says Cascino, about 70 to 80 percent of objects brought into the FixIt Clinics have been repaired. Marc rings the bell for the Cuisinart toaster, and I walk out in a golden haze.
As I drive to Curcio’s house the next day, I realize that when I pick up the chair — its cane taut and beautiful again, whole — I’ll be able to tell her I did it, too. I fixed something!
Veronique Greenwood is a science writer who contributes frequently to Globe Ideas.
*Maine Writer P.S. "planned obsolesce" a new phrase for the day!😊
Labels: planned obsolescence, The Boston Globe, Veronique Greenwood, Worcester Mass
posted by Juliana L'Heureux at 10:22 AM
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