Nobody fixes anything anymore.

What do you do with a toaster that won't toast? A VCR that won't record? A lamp that won't light the room? How about a washer that won't work on all its cycles? A dryer that makes a sound like a horse being tortured (I had that one)? And then there's that computer that keeps locking up.


Who will fix these things?


Simple answer: Nobody.


In our throw-away society, nobody fixes anything. When it doesn't work, we throw it away. Meaning that we put it into our trash container and say bye-bye. Off to the landfill.

Bon voyage!

There was a time, within my lifetime, when people made a living repairing appliances. In fact, the whole idea of Goodwill Industries, if I'm not mistaken, was to take donated items that didn't work anymore and give disabled people -- who were largely unemployable in those days --the job of repairing them. Goodwill has long since been transitioned into an after-sale thrift store where not just those of us on minimum wage salaries but the well-to-do shop for bargains. A throw-away society throws away perfectly good items, in working condition, and smart shoppers are there to snatch them up.

I was struck by how far up the price chain this mentality had gone when I had a copier that was mal-functioning. It got stuck and wouldn't make copies -- which is the only thing it had to do. I checked the Yellow Pages and called a copier repair shop. Sorry, they said, that one is obsolete, and we can't get parts. Obsolete? I paid $400 for it two years ago! So now what am I supposed to do with it?

You know the answer: the landfill.

We have, in my town, one shop that will repair things. Tucked away downtown in a space I'm sure his landlord would love to turn into a Starbucks, this guy fixes lamps and toasters and most applicances that don't involve electronic circuits. But once he's gone, where will all those lamps go? And the toasters? And the curling irons or hair-dryers that just need a new cord?

Yes, I know we can "re-cycle" our old computer components -- monitors, printers, even the computers themselves -- in a responsible fashion, so as not to unleash too much mercury, or whatever other contaminants, into the air, often for a charge. But the point remains: Why doesn't someone repair some of these relatively expensive items? When did it become more profitable to just ditch whatever didn't work and buy a new one?


I assume it's when electronics became more sophisticated, when watches became digital and we suddenly had microwave ovens and VCRs. Once you couldn't go inside a machine and replace worn-out parts -- because there weren't any -- the whole repair industry just sort of went away.
(I'm sure you've noticed that almost no one works on their own cars these days, but because new ones are way too expensive to buy more than once a decade or so, there IS an automotive repair industry, and a very lucrative one at that -- precisely because we can't do the repairs ourselves.)

But if the boom in complicated electronics it has been bad news for the folks who made their living fixing things, it's worse news for us consumers: when something breaks now, we know we're going to have a replacement. And we also have to feel guilty about throwing away an item that we KNOW someone could fix -- but no one will. (And we don't know how.)


But it's not just the broken things that we are getting rid of at an alarming rate nowadays. A computer or monitor in perfect working condition that's more than a few years old can't be GIVEN away! Not even under-funded schools in poor neighborhoods want them. I have, as I'm sure you have, some of these machines sitting around, gathering dust. We don't want to part with them, because they still work, but we can't donate them because they're not wanted, but still we need the space.

Yeah, you know the answer: the landfill. Yes, as I said before, there are ways to recycle these things, and some of us do, but lots more of us don't. I've heard that our landfills -- dumps, we used to call them -- are filled mostly with newspapers. I have no doubt that, within a decade or two, they will be mostly filled with old computers and computer components.

Why?

You know why. Nobody fixes anything anymore.

I guess my point is that we've gone from a society that conserves and values what we have, fixing it when it's broken, passing it on to someone a little less well off when we get a new one, using it again and again, to one that sees every item as disposable, easily replaceable. It's a fundamental mental shift. A new, and disturbing, paradigm. I'm sure it has dire implications for the environment, but it's also troubling for what it says about us and who we've become.

There is, I think, something intrinsically wrong with wasting anything, especially when many of the people in the world don't even have electricity, much less a computer. Or a toaster.

Speaking of which, I'm giving mine one more minute to pop that piece of bread up. I'm timing it on my digital watch. (My old analog one is in a drawer; it stopped working.) If it fails the test, you know where it's going. And you know where I'll be going soon after, right?

To K-Mart, of course. To get a new toaster.