I have managed the day-to-day operations in the MAL to ever-greater degree over
the past 9 and a half years, and often find myself in charge of either doing or coordinating repairs
on everything from typewriters to 40 year old desktop computers to game consoles. But the lab
constitutes a network of connections, both near and far, both more and less involved. I can and do
call on all of that generously given information and time constantly.
Even with all that, due to limited resources (both temporal and monetary), aging knowledge bases, and
so many other factors, the repair process can sometimes span years. That was the case with our
recently re-functional Apple Lisa, which entered disfunctional status in 201 and only recently (as
of last Friday) truly became functional once more. While there are also repairs that are a matter of
two minutes and some solder, it's almost never really clear what a repair job will entail from the
start.
For MAL and for myself, all of this has meant developing a more intentional and almost meditative
attitude where repair and maintenance are concerned. Function and dysfunction are fluid states.
Something that worked yesterday may not work today, and some things mysteriously function now when
they didn't previously. That isn't a negative or a positive, just a statement of fact.
More often than not, there is human intervention at the heart of the state change. Things shift from
function to dysfunction through normal use in conjunction with time, through mis-use either
unintentional or otherwise, through dis-use and a lack of attention and the inevitable effect of
entropy on an object made of matter in a neverending state of decay.
There are stages to developing this attitude - like with grief, or decomposition. I've had to accept
some truths in order to keep the peace with the objects that I've found myself responsible for.
Everything is material, whether that is perceptible or not. And all material things are subject to
physics. Maintenance minimizes repair. But repair is inevitable.
Accepting that all things are physical, or as one of my tattoos reads, that "everyhing is stuff", has
been a gradual broadening of awareness. It's easy, convenient even, to see the suface without
thinking about the rest. And it's overwhelming and uncomfortable to think about every atom of carbon
or copper required for the devices that deliver new photographs of the moon to my eyes.
But sitting in that discomfort is useful, because it forces an amount of care that I couldn't
otherwise arrive at. Once I accepted that everything was stuff, I could also acknowledge that that
stuff is subject to the laws of physics. No physical thing is static, the limits of human perception
notwithstanding.
The physicist's joke that the only constant is change isn't really a joke as much as it's a lament
that the material world can't live up to the perfection of their equations. And i think anyone who
has ever 3d modeled things and then tried to 3d print them has at some point known viscerally the
difference between the ideal and the material.
The philosophical utility in all this, though, is that once I really was able to accept, well,
thermodynamics and all that entails, I could also accept that maintenance is necessary to keep things in a
state I want or need. And that if that maintenance fails, repair is also necessary. Again, neither bad nor
good, just fact.
That philosophical attitude is much more peaceful than the alternative, anger or frustration at the
needs of the objects in my care. Instead it becomes a relationship where the machine gives what I want
as long as i can give what it wants in return. Reading the machines - diagnostics, if you want - is a
big part of the process.
And while it's an inclination for me, i was the kid taking things apart without permission and
putting them back together in new and often parentally unwanted combinations, it's also a skill that
can be learned and honed. Seeing common patterns of failure gives insight into where to start with
the next machine. Following the traces on a circuit board, deciphering the interactions of gears and
motors, it's a visual language that experience teaches.
At the simplest level, everything isn't just stuff, it's essentially the same stuff. The same base
elements formed into different discrete components. The same discrete components configured in
myriad ways to form different machines. So you can start to recognize the parts that make up one
whole as an alternative organization of the same parts that make up a different whole. And from
there, start to build an understanding that transfers pretty readily from one job to another.
For me that recognition also transfers to the patterns of the broader world. If it's possible to
repair a thing i can hold, maybe i can repair more than that. Maybe together we can repair even
more. In the world now, the alternative to maintenance and repair is often disposal. Repairing
things is acknowledging that they are worth saving.
