Last week I was walking in the hot sun after a nice lunch and I realized that my shoe had come untied. Not relishing the prospect of a doing a face plant, I began to kneel down intending to relieve myself of this unfortunate liability. Suddenly I was watching my beloved Rio Karma MP3 player hurdle downward in slow motion and crash upon the asphalt. As the battery cover flew off and the battery rolled hurriedly away I began to realize the immensity of the boner I had just pulled. Had I really been idiot enough to put my Karma in my front shirt pocket and then bend over without taking the effects of gravity into account? Argh!! I quickly tied up my cursed shoelaces and collected the scattered pieces of my precious mind-soothing device. I popped in the battery, snapped on the cover, and quickly pushed the power button with great anticipation. Nothing. Falling to my knees with arms to the sky and mourned the passing of my friend with a protracted knell of agony and despair.
Tonight I found some time to do a proper autopsy and attempted to determine the probable cause of death. After some difficulty getting the plastic case off I finally came to hold an elegant little assemblage of circuitry and computer chips. I didn’t expect to see anything here that I could understand as being the point of failure. But as anyone who understands the hacker ethic will tell you, there can be great joy in taking broken shit apart just to have a look inside. And yet I held out hope that just maybe there was something I could do to restore my trusty gizmo.
The modern world is one of miniaturized circuits with multipurpose components and the magic of digital logic powering even the simplest products we buy. So how could a lone geek with an amateurish grasp of electronics engineering expect to make heads or tails of a dead MP3 player? This very thought was beckoning me to turn back, to gather up my pile of plastic and wires and drop it into the trash. But then, as I held the brain of my favorite gadget against the light, I saw it! The power switch came unseated from the PCB, and the solder pads were still intact!
I knew then that fixing it wouldn’t be hard. Hell, getting the case off was ten times harder than soldering the switch back on. And yet, seeing it come back to life again felt really good. It was the first time I had used my soldering iron to fix something I accidentally broke. Besides to proclaim my victory, there’s another reason I decided to write about this. Simply put, I’m fascinated by the evolution of tools. According to archaeologists, our ancestors first got the idea to start making and using tools about 800,000 years ago. Since then our technology has come so far along that a great many of the tools most people use in daily life are far beyond their ability to reproduce, repair, or even maintain. For the most part, We don’t even question the absurdity of this situation. Something breaks and we usually toss it and just buy a new one. If it’s something costly we sometimes take it to a specialist for repair but increasingly we find that such expert services are cost prohibitive anyway.
Considering the case of my broken MP3 player, what percentage of consumers have the confidence and skill to do the kind of repair that was necessary? It’s surely far below even one percent. My tiny triumph feels great because I now know for certain that at least sometimes, with a little bravery and a few cheap tools, I can fix my own stuff and save some money. Things aren’t so tiny yet that people like me are totally helpless.
It is sad to imagine that as consumer products begin to integrate nanoscale electromechanical devices the ability to keep things working with a little careful inspection and a DIY attitude will evaporate. The quality of our lives will be so vastly improved while simultaneously rendering us helpless to the tactics of planned obsolescence.

