Happiness is a capacitor replaced

In his book “The Case for Working with Your Hands: or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good”, Matthew B. Crawford explores the reasons why manual labour such as repairing a motorbike, building a wall or repairing an item of furniture, is both pleasurable and beneficial. It is a manifesto for the restoration of what, in my day, was called CDT (Craft, Design and Technology) to its rightful place as a first-class component in our education system.

The book seems to have struck a chord with Education Secretary Michael Gove: after all, in it Crawford describes precisely the changes that have occurred in the UK education system over the past twenty years, including the abolition of Polytechnics and near total loss of apprentices. At the same time government  has driven to get every single pupil into university under the mis-guided assumption that this constitutes equal opportunity and paves the way to a happier, wealthier society. It is nothing of the sort.

As with Mr Gove this book resonated with me. My working life is spent mostly in front of a computer: it is my tool for research, I write code, I manage systems, I shop, I browse. Much of this is creative and software development is a deeply intellectually stimulating endeavour. 

But by day my work life is without dirt, sweat, or physical exertion aside from the commute on my bicycle. Come the weekend I want none of it. I am instead eager to do something practical - to use my hands. A couple of weekends ago it was servicing the bike. Nothing too complex. Every 18 months or so the chainset wears out and so I found my self cleaning the bike, stripping down the chain rings, the casette and the chain. Doing this and replacing them, along with renewing brake blocks and going over the bike with a hex key and spanner is a task that is within the reach of most anyone. The pleasure comes in making something better with one’s own hands and in one’s own time - taking ownership of a problem and asserting control over one’s destiny. My ride is much better, and I didn’t need anyone’s help. I got greasy and a bit cold. It felt great.

Today it was a little different. I repaired my DVD player. It only cost forty quid a few years ago, and we don’t use it a great deal except to play Thomas the Tank Engine and Maisy DVDs for #1 son. Maisy was in fact trapped within the dead machine. The horror! I’m guessing most people would throw away and pay again but the wife turned to Google and found that lots of people experienced the same symptoms and that it was likely as not a single capacitor on the power board that had failed. Power boards are a typical source of failure in a lot of electronics so this sounded reasonable. The replacement component cost around fifty pence so it was worth trying it out. 

To replace the capacitor took, maybe, five or ten minutes. #1 son assisted and was delighted to see Maisy spinning happily when we fired up the machine with the top off so we could see the moving parts. It was most satisfactory.

Repairing the machine was a tiny job, and saved fifty pounds maybe. But that was not the point. I’d been able to preserve my autonomy and assert authority over a gadget that, with its microchips and dense circuit boards is more often than not beyond our practical ability to fix.  My destiny in this case was not for Philips to shape: it was mine to guide with a soldering iron and a capacitor (and not a little advice from those helpful enough to post on the web!)

Mr Crawford would understand.