I've just fixed a fan. That is, I took it apart, as far as I could, vacuumed the dust that I could reach, and put a couple of drops of oil on the shaft of the electric motor. (Not too much. Once you *start* putting oil on, or in, electric motors, it seems to attract even more dust, and turns it into a reasonable approximation of concrete.) That's about the extent of my fix-it skills. I wasn't sure (I'm never sure) whether that would be sufficient, and I'd pack it and take it with me, or whether I'd be packing it off to Value Village for someone with greater skills than I have to bring it back to life. Fairly close to the end I was pretty sure it wasn't going to work, but then it did, so it's coming to Port Alberni. I suppose it doesn't owe me anything. It was a cheap thing to begin with (although the largest fan I ever got, and with twenty screws on the box frame that I had to take out to get at the innards), but it kept Gloria and I cool for a couple of summers, and it was useful this past summer.
I'm not a handyman. I'm not good at a lot of guy stuff. I don't have collections of tools, or care if you say nasty things about my car, or talk about transmissions when I get together with other guys. I go along with the old computer joke: How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? None: that's a hardware problem. I'm hardware challenged.
This is generally seen as a failure in our society. If you're a guy, you should be able to fix things. I can't. Well, occasionally I can, but I'm never confident of my ability in that area (all guys are supremely confident). If someone else wants to have at it, I'll let them. But I still feel bad about it. Like the new place. I figured out that the overflow drain in the bathtub wasn't working. It was J (who is a really great hardware and fix-it guy) who knew that you could pop the cap off the drain, and found that the builders had left a piece of tape blocking the drain. I wouldn't even know to try. I'd figure I'd probably break something in the attempt.
The thing is, I can fix some things. I can fix it when someone is having a problem with their computer. Or phone. I can fix Apple devices, even though I only have one (and it's almost two decades old). (I had another, but it went with the antique computer stuff in the first move.) I can fix a lot of computer problems, with a lot of computers, even though they are way more complicated than fans or bathtubs.
And I'll tell you how to approach and fix your computer problems, while I'm doing it. In fact, *I* won't do the fixing. You will. I'll be watching, and telling you what to do, and explaining what is happening, and why it went wrong in the first place. I won't even touch your computer. (The computer facile all, eventually, learn that if you ever touch anyone else's computer, even once, everything that goes wrong, from then on, is your fault, and your responsibility to fix. Even if what went wrong is actually "computers don't *do* that" [for various values of "that," meaning "what I want the computer to do for me"].) I'll explain, and teach, and direct, and you'll do it. So that you have a better chance of fixing it next time.
The computer facile have this reputation for not explaining the arcane mysteries of our craft. In reality, yes, there are some who jump in and fix things without ever saying what they've done or why. But the computer facile are far better at explaining what they are doing than fix-it guys. Starting with my Dad, I've never had *any* guy, fixing something, whether it be a bathtub, or a car, or an electrical relay signal switch, explain what he was doing, or why, while he was doing it. There's just a flurry of tools, an occasional "Ah!" and the end result. We, the computer facile, get a bad wrap, and rep.
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