Repairing the World…
Happy New Year! (He wrote, on February 3…)
I resolved to keep up a regular cadence of writing in 2023. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your feelings about this newsletter) that resolution was to keep the cadence as minimal as possible.
Today’s missive is another take on the “Right to Repair” movement.
“ANOTHER?” you ask. “Did I miss the previous entries about Right to Repair?”
No, you didn’t. I just cleverly hid them in my posts about fixing my laptop (Happy Face) and fixing my iPhone (Very Sad Face.)
Today’s chapter of the Right to Repair is about my clothes dryer.
Our dryer is a GE model, about eight years old, pretty basic. Works great, along the lines of:
> Push button
> Blows hot air
> Clothes dry.
That’s pretty much all I need in a dryer. It doesn’t need a remote control, or an Internet connection, or a touch panel, or forty different settings that all mean “delicate” or the ability to tweet out to my nine followers that the load is done.
I need:
Hot air, blowing, until the clothes are dry.
So, a couple of days ago, our basic but effective GE dryer starts making the most god-awful screeching/scraping/grinding noise I have heard in some time. I’m trying to come up with an adequate comparison and words almost fail. (I would ask Chat GPT to come up with the words for me, but I just tried to log on and it’s “AT CAPACITY RIGHT NOW” meaning most of America’s students – grades K through post-doctoral - are using it to write their first term papers of the Spring semester, so I’m S.O.L.)
Anyway, imagine taking a big box of broken glass, sand, gravel, nails and Gizmo from the movie “Gremlins” and throwing them into my dryer and turning it on.
THAT’S what my dryer sounded like.
So, I immediately leap into action and start pricing new dryers because NOBODY fixes anything anymore because by the time you’re done with waiting for the service call and parts, your eight-year-old dryer costs $300 and two weeks to repair, and you’re wearing the same pair of underwear for the sixth time and you could have bought a brand new one that connects to the Internet and makes espresso for $600, so fuck it, it’s OFF TO THE LANDFILL WITH YOU, DRYER!
Then I fall asleep.
I wake up the next morning and think “I’m NOT buying a new one and I’m NOT paying $300 for a service call!”
That only leaves one choice: YouTube.
I open YouTube and type in “GE DRYER MAKING GRINDING NOISE.”
Literally, the first result is an awesome young man called “Washer Dryer Money” who not only describes my problem EXACTLY, but shows me step-by-step how to fix it.
Honestly, it took less than 15 minutes. Four screws. That’s it. The only reason I couldn’t do it all in one day is because I had to order the parts. There are four Teflon strips that are attached to the dryer drum to make sure there is as little friction as possible when the thing is doing its thing. One of those strips had worn down and was broken, causing the plastic frame thingee that the drum sits in to touch the drum itself and – WHAMMO! – Gizmo is pureed when the dryer is spinning.
I order the parts on – where else – Amazon, and they arrive the next day. Cost: $11.00.
Takes me five minutes to install them, five minutes to put the dryer back together and – Bob’s your uncle – dryer working perfectly.
Just so we’re clear: I still think of myself as the guy who utterly failed seventh grade shop class. But, I had nothing to lose with each of these repairs in that I was fully prepared to replace the broken device with a new one.
The Internet is no doubt a cesspool of many, many bad things that are ruining civilization. But until that actually happens, there are pockets of goodness and good people who just want to help, or bring happiness, or joy or beauty into our lives.
Don’t be intimidated by Big Appliance (or Big Computer, or Big Smart Phone or Big Whatever.) If something you own is broken, I can almost guarantee that some smart, well-meaning nerd person has had one break and has figured out how to fix it and has posted a video to show YOU how to do the same. Doesn’t matter if it’s a 1913 Victrola, or middle-of-the road GE dryer. The truth is out there!
So, a hearty “Happy New Year” and “Thank you” to the Internet. I know it’s just a matter of time before you destroy the world. But until you do, it’s nice to know you have my back.