I just finished cleaning the bathroom and the last thing I did was moisten a sponge, cut it in half lengthwise and place a piece on each side of the faucet. Why? Well, it’s the easiest way I’ve found to prevent water from pooling on the countertop. We could try to fix the leak ourselves and, if we weren’t renters, that’s probably the direction I’d prefer. We could call up the property manager and request that he send a plumber; And then call him again next week; And then write him a letter; And then play voice-mail tag for a while (I think you see where this is headed – He’s not the most responsive of managers). But all I really care about is that water doesn’t pool up on the counter and drip onto the floor and make a general nuisance of itself. The sponge works perfectly.
I grew up in a family that values the ability to fix things. Whenever an object does not function as desired the first thought is, “What can I do, right now, to get this thing working again?” Paying someone to fix the problem is way down on the list, about on par with throwing the offending piece away. This practice has led to some interesting situations.
After completing high school in 1990 I applied to, and was accepted by, a small liberal arts college in southeast Washington state. My parents decided to caravan up with me and help in the settling in process so we packed up the cars, my ’80 Mazda 626 and their ’79 Seville, and set off on the thousand mile trip. Things went fine the first day out, we stopped for the night somewhere in the vicinity of Redding, woke up and turned off the 5 at Weed to cut through central Oregon.
South of Bend (but probably closer to Chiloquin) things took a turn for the worse when Murphy reared his ugly head. My fan decided that it was tired of being tied down in a job with no opportunity for advancement and broke loose. Freedom was short lived, however, since the fan spun forward only about two inches before it came to a halt after carving its way into the radiator. The radiator proceeded to spew coolant and I become aware of the problem when the temperature needle started moving upward with alarming speed. In retrospect, I probably should’ve been driving with the stereo a little lower - the bump of the bass must have camouflaged the sound of the fan meeting the radiator.
It took a while for my parents to realize I wasn’t in the rearview mirror and they turned around and came back to find me parked by the side of the road with the hood up. The radiator was a loss. The engine worked fine but we couldn’t run it for long without coolant. My first class was the next day and it was beginning to look like we’d have to leave my car by the side of the road.
While I started unpacking everything from the Mazda my dad and mom headed to the nearest town. After what seemed like a couple of hours they came back with the solution to our problem: they had scoured the town and found the only radiator remotely close to the size I needed. Unfortunately, it was from a riding lawnmower and had only about half the cooling area of my radiator. But beggars can’t be choosers.
My mom and I started separating out my dad’s clothes and repacking all of my possessions into the Cadillac. Meanwhile, my dad pulled out the radiator and tied in the one from the lawnmower with baling wire. After some modifications to the hoses and refilling of coolant we were ready to turn on the engine and test out the patch. It worked pretty good but there was no way the new radiator would cool the engine for an extended period of time. However, it would have to do.
We went our separate ways: me and my mom heading north in the Cadillac and my dad heading south in the Mazda. He had to stop as soon as the temperature needle started to move and wait for the engine to cool down but he made it, in leapfrog fashion, home to Los Angeles more than seven hundred miles away. Once he had the Mazda home it was a simple matter to track down the right radiator and make the replacement (although there were additional repairs that needed to be made and we ended up just replacing the engine with a low mileage block from Japan – but the whole job cost much less than buying another car). I got another nine years of life out of that car and it retired with 250,000 miles on the odometer.
Late last year I was reminded of the fact that different people have different attitudes towards things that break. My brother and his family were hosting a Christmas Eve party and there were plenty of children running around excitedly opening and playing with their presents. (I just have to interject that it’s not right to open presents on the night before – it’s just not right – but what can you do). My twelve year old nephew, actually my niece’s cousin, almost passed out from delight when he unwrapped his first slot car set. He and his friends proceeded to unpack all the parts, assemble them in a reasonable facsimile of the picture on the box, scrounge up the necessary number of batteries, place the slot cars on the track, plug in the controllers, and ready themselves for some serious racing action. Nothing. Nada. Zip. The cars didn’t budge. There’s nothing quite like a disappointed twelve year old on Christmas Eve – there should be a law against that.
The person who gave him the gift, a boyfriend of one of his aunts, consoled him by promising to take the set back to the store and replace it after the holidays were over. I immediately got out the instructions, pulled everything apart, and proceeded to re-assemble the set (making sure the brushes of the cars were touching the metal, verifying that the batteries and the plugs were inserted correctly, pushing each section of track together tightly, etc.). The thing still didn’t work. At this point I was sure that I had eliminated all but two potential sources of error: either both cars didn’t work (which I put at a low probability), or there was a break in the circuit and current was not flowing (which I put at a high probability given the fragile nature of the wiring and the vigor with which it had been handled).
I talked to my brother and made sure that he had all the necessary equipment (tester, soldering iron, wire, wire strippers) and then I explained the situation to my nephew. I told him that he had two options: he could wait until after the holidays to get the replacement or he could give me permission to try and fix the set that night (I put the probability of success at 90 percent – just because I don’t give ironclad guarantees). The only caveat was that, in the process of testing and repairing the circuit, I would be doing things that would void any warranty and probably make it impossible to get an exchange. When I asked him what his choice was, based on that information, he thought about it for a while, looked at me solemnly and said that he’d rather just wait until it could be exchanged at the store. I respected his decision, and had to console myself with the knowledge that his culture was different from my own – at least with respect to this one issue.
But I totally could’ve gotten that thing working.
