The Disappearing Art of Maintenance

Our future is going to be a shitstorm of breakage. Covid should have taught us a lesson but we're going to go on while infrastructure (physical and virtual) starts to break and no Top 10 grad is going to want to touch it. You're not going to have a choice about plumbing or roof leaks - nobody is coming for a week and you are on your own.

On your knees - I look at my classmates now and consider HS sports to be child abuse. My coworkers talk about their kids surgeries. Those 4 or 5 people boarding your plane in wheelchairs now? It's going to be 3X that in a decade. But that'll be fine, because you'll have to wait a couple hours for the rare pilot to show up.

And people have been choosing short term rewards for many generations and probably all of humanity, even when they know otherwise.

Everyone knows to eat and drink less/better and exercise more, but few do it, because it is not fun.

Seems as if the only way to really reduce a maintenance burden is to simplify your life more and more including the things in your life. But then you are still having to take care of your body and if you have a family others as well. I can understand a society that has FOMO will put maintenance on the backburner. There just isn't enough time to have your cake and eat it too in our modern world it seems.

I think you're probably right.

As another simple example, I like to actually keep a pretty clean house. I know that this frustrates roommates or other people I live with but it actually takes very little work to keep the house clean (I'm honestly a pretty lazy person). My motto is "It is far easier to _keep_ things clean than it is to _make_ things clean later." It is amazing how far just wiping up a mess when it is made goes to keeping things clean. Takes 5 seconds if you do it after the mess is made but 15 minutes if you wait. Or just simple maintenance things like once a week spray your shower with bleach water 15 minutes before you get in (and rinse the walls). (Obviously there's exceptions to the "clean now" "rules" because schedules get tight and that's not always possible. So I just want to make it clear I'm not harassing people. I just don't want a stove top covered in oil or garbage littered in the house)

I think this style of maintenance extends well beyond cleanliness or health. We also probably undervalue it because we're also pretty well known to be bad at future planning. It is basically the Marshmallow Experiment. For cleaning (or most maintenance tasks) the cost is little now but requires effort now while the cost is higher in the future but you're able to put off the effort. Problem being that we view future costs/rewards as smaller than immediate costs/rewards. I always wonder how much faster humans could progress if we were able to more accurately internalize future costs/rewards into our mental models (even just a small improvement).

I can already imagine a bunch of people here saying to themselves my hourly rate is worth much more than this 20 bucks wallet and yes, so is mine, but there is something pleasing about not throwing everything away at the first sign of wear.

When you say "Humans simple do NOT" what you really mean is "MY demographic does not". Even in the US or Canada that is very much dependent on the area and the demographic you grew up. I am not at all surprised that people who's only goal in life is to make as much money as people in the valley and who buy a new iphone every 1 or 2 years find the act of maintaining things insane.

Unfortunately this problem has seeped through society in which I would call the proliferation of business school graduates who are now at the top of most business chains and who have traded any long term benefit for short term gains.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/xma9ad/im_...

https://workchronicles.substack.com/p/comic-prevention-vs-cu...

I worked on industrial maintenance for 7 years. While some of what you say is true, there's a lot wrong.

> They are usually lowly paid and have low moral because what they work is chore.

Not the case for me or anyone I worked with. The pay was very good. We had skills that were very hard to replace (PLC programming, high-tech press fitting, experience on very large machines that were basically one of a kind, so you can't just take people from other companies that have the same thing or even close). Morale was high because even though engineers and managers don't respect us, we didn't respect them either so we could almost do anything we wanted! Which was ok because we were more needed than they were... one day off for us cost millions to the company if a machine stopped working (an engineer could take a week off and no one noticed).

> They also do not get to enjoy creating new things.

In some shitty companies maybe... I was able to design from scratch large machines that we then proceeded to build and use in production. Really cool stuff that I really loved.

My last job in maintenance let me spend most of my time writing software for the maintenance inventory, which was hard to keep up-to-date and off-the-shelf software for that was very expensive... despite us having fairly simple needs (which is why was able to write it myself using a mix of VBA and MS Access... this was a long time ago). After that, I noticed I could do software and started going to uni for a Compute Science degree. Which I attended WHILE working in maintenance as the job was mostly waiting for shit to happen so I had lots of "free" time. Took me around 10 years in software to start earning substantially more than I used to in maintenance.

I did it mostly to avoid the shit parts of the job: cleaning shit, changing oil, greasing gears and what not... that part was not fun.

A service that hums along quietly gets its budget cut. A dumpster fire that produces tickets and visible fixes/hero moments gets a big budget re-up.

The basic issue is of course inability to predict the future, inability of management to properly judge things, etc. Management is:

Charitable version: full of people that necessarily cannot have full context/detail and must make quick high-level decisions

Not Charitable version: full of sociopaths whose primary job is to maintain or improve standing, and secondary concern is making good long term decisions for a company, so cutting maintenance or spinning slapdash solutions and failures as epic wins is more effective.

Would be cool if a bicycle bottom bracket or hub had those fittings.

I volunteer at a bike co-op and between the generations, there’s been a toooooon of “standards”.

Frequent mixes of imperial and metric. A French/Italian/British bike may have the opposite threading on parts than you expect. Different widths of spindles and wheel dishing and spoke lengths and oh my!

How many mm wide would you like your tire? And will it even fit? Can you use that 700C accessory on your 27” or are you SOL?

If we didn’t have a boneyard of bikes to scavenge from/strip for parts, we’d get nowhere.

Then the corrosion issues when you “upgrade” to an aluminum seat post or stem on a steel frame…

I guess part of this problem is the durability of bicycles. Cars probably have the same problem but their lifespan is a lot more limited.

Lots of (small s) specialized tools out there because the manufacturer never intended for you to actually take the thing apart. Every design of freewheels required a different tool to remove.

Definitely assembled several Frankenstein-bikes in my lifetime where you’ll need a rather diverse set of tools from different generations of bikes to eventually repair!

You spend a long time arguing the opposite with your bicycle argument. The government never forced them to standardize and they did.

That said, if you ride bikes regularly but take it to the shop for maintenance, try doing your next service yourself. There are tons of online videos to help you. It will require an upfront investment of some tools, but they will pay for themselves the second time you use them.

No, obviously you're not familiar with bicycles at all. When was the last time you worked with a bicycle? 1975?

Every modern road bike has integrated brake/shifter levers, and has for 30 years. What universe do you live in?

Non-standard parts are commonplace: there's at least a dozen bottom bracket standards, and lots of road bikes have press-fit bottom brackets. The industry is moving away from this thankfully, and threaded brackets are now becoming the norm again (using a particular standard, I forget the name). Axle sizes (diameter, thread pitch, width) are also all over the place, though here again they seem to be converging.

As for fluids, every decent bike these days has hydraulic disc brakes, which use either mineral oil (Shimano and clones) or DOT4 brake fluid (SRAM).

Your post is really bizarre; was it meant to be satire or something?

In order for the solution to "once again" be government regulation, there has to be a past example of a coordination problem that was solved optimally by government regulation. Do you have such an example?

All of the examples I can think of involving political intervention are ones that culminated in a suboptimal status quo being artificially locked in place due to incremental innovation on the margin being suppressed and/or the regulatory system being co-opted by its intended targets to create intentional barriers to entry.

Conversely, we have plenty of examples of ecosystems converging to compatible standards organically, as we see in most of the world of computing technology, e.g. with PC hardware standards, internet protocols, etc.

If it is, it's also a Canadian thing, and a western European thing, at the very least.

I like how one counter-example from China means that something is a "US thing". This happens a lot on the internet: "Here's a non-US counter example, that must mean this is US only!"

Here's a YouTube channel that restores things in the US: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPygLEFniGZmehxouDK-vbw

My highschool had the most garbage technical curriculum (southwest US).

For more urban places, look for makerspaces or hacker spaces. If you find one that doesn't have the stuff you are looking for, consider donating some entry level versions. One huge problem for urban centers like this is just how much space machinery takes up. You need a large open shop, and that costs a lot.

Maybe YouTube videos work too, but I really do not have confidence changing toilets or laying out my own plank wood. Like, how many times do I renovate in my LIFE? Probably just 3-4 times, so if I fuck up once I pretty much take away all values from the other 2-3.

Username def checks out

You could also guilt trip Samsung on Twitter and they might replace it for free

The Samsung branded appliances and devices however are total garbage and Samsung dgaf. It might actually be part of their business model.

I have rarely heard someone say how happy they are with their Samsung anything, especially not their fridges and other appliances. “Built to fail” is something that often comes up, however.

It seems like such a simple device, yet they are devilish to diagnose and repair apparently!

If you ever need replacement parts for any home appliances you should go to one of these places [0], [1] where you can get OEM parts instead of aftermarket parts that may not work great.

[0] https://www.appliancepartspros.com/

[1] https://www.ereplacementparts.com/appliance-parts.html

Both sites have exploded diagrams that help you find the part you need and in many cases they have videos to show how to do the repair.

I think "garbage" disposal is way too cheap: books, clothing and electronics are things that should be really expensive to throw away as most often they can be re-used, re-purposed or at least gutted. When disposing them as garbage is more expensive and less convenient than finding someone who wants to take the stuff, people will be motivated to at least donate them.

In the past, schools had shop classes and home economics. I took both when I was growing up. Many schools don't have these classes anymore so kids don't get a foundation in being hands on. They don't get comfortable doing their own things. I think this is bad for society.

I know retired folks who work as handy men who have people in their 20's and early 30's as clients. They do simple things like hang pictures on walls (not joking).

Skilled trades working in plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, and so forth are going to be in higher demand in the future. Many are hitting retirement age and the back fill behind them isn't happening. This is happening at the same time construction is going up. Where I live it's almost impossible to find someone to do minor work around your house. Everyone is off doing the big ticket jobs.

Of course, the idea of recycle old things and buy new isn't working out so well. It's often throw out the old (where we fill dumps at increasing rates) and buy new. Setup by companies who make more money that way. For their financial benefit rather than our or our planets benefit.

Fixing things has never been easier. You can learn a ton a youtube these days. There are books, too. Parts are easier than ever to find and order.

I feel like it's partly a consequence of a highly specialized society. I'm not sure how to fix it. There's an opportunity cost. Why would I change the oil in my car when it's $40 to get it changed at the shop? Since I don't change my oil, I now don't know the basics of how to jack up the vehicle, I don't understand how to use the torque wrench to tighten the drain plug and I'm basically missing all the fundamental skills so I got no knowledge to build on.

The other contributor, is that growing up in the city, in an apartment, there was never any opportunity to work with my hands. I still recall a shop class in high school. I got to use a lathe and a oxy acetylene torch. That was many years ago now.

Now that I'm older, I make conscious effort to learn how to do things with my hands. There are things that I still must outsource, when they are on a critical path. For example if the car is down because the suspension needs to be replaced, I'm not going to spend 3 months researching and fixing it. We need it now.

I've come to really appreciate the famous Heinlein quote:

> A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Im also very much attracted to the idea of a "renaissance man" [1] :

> Embodying a basic tenet of Renaissance humanism that humans are limitless in their capacity for development, the concept led to the notion that people should embrace all knowledge and develop their capacities as fully as possible.

"Specialization is for insects" indeed.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competent_man

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath

I think this attitude does carry over into our product design efforts but only to a degree - in consumer tech it makes sense to make your product somewhat robust and serviceable but a device from 10 years ago, with lo-speed Wifi, no bluetooth, no USB, etc. just isn't useful anymore. On the flipside, the manufacturing tools we design for our own use are so robust and reconfigurable that they are still cranking out product 20+ years later.

Nowadays, the running joke in the Subaru community is that you change the spark plugs any time you have the engine out of the car whether they're due or not. My wife has a 2018 Impreza. It's somewhat more cramped in the engine compartment. I dread the day I have to work on it.

Tinkering is a lost art. Increasingly, people seem to just watch others tinker or solve problems. Why do x if you can just search for what happens on youtube? Why think through the process or what a reasonable answer is if you can just google (andisearch is good too) it? (Why search, when you can just post it as a question on a forum?) 10 years ago, commenters here would talk about tinkering with their systems in basic, when asked how they learned to program. Nowadays, people talk about textbooks or the like. But why?

Everything is more complex and complicated. Fixing something in 1950 was easy, you could wire it yourself with copper, you could replace the vacuum tubes. Nowadays, you can just replace electronic parts - but you can't make the circuit board yourself (well, some people do, but that's much more in depth, requires very fine motor control and you are still just soldering tiny components. I suspect a lot of would-have-tinkereds give up when they take apart their x with a screw driver and can't figure out what anything is. Their curiosity nipped right in the bud, they default to trusted solutions and devote less of their daily mindshare to understanding, and eventually improving the world.

(Even there, it's not like many people could create vacuum tubes in their garage in 1950 to repair something...)

[1] Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance [2] Shop Class as Soul Craft

Huge impact for me over my decades here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_... [2] http://www.matthewbcrawford.com/new-page-1-1-2

When they ask "why on earth would you do that," I just say: "because we're rapidly moving toward a point where nobody actually knows how to do anything because they just hired someone else to do it and now those people don't exist (and other people weren't interested in inheriting their knowledge). 20 years down the road, I'd like to be able to fix stuff when it breaks without having to wait months, years, or potentially never to get it fixed."

There's a deep, deep need for a resurgence of DIY culture across the board.

Sometimes that's what you have to do. I generally like to have at least a cursory understanding of what the person I'm paying is doing.

> Well, it doesn't matter if it's easy to fix, we'll just recycle it and build a new one

Last night I've diagnosed the problem with a Z80 computer - the one I wrote my first lines of code in 1988. It cannot be replaced. I'm waiting for a chip to come from China to fix. Cost $1.50 + my spare time.

Some things just have to be recycled and rebuild. Batteries come to mind. Modern cars should be getting progressively easier to repair - they have onboard computers that basically _know_ what's wrong. But the parts we replace are getting larger and larger. Where we would replace a capacitor, we are replacing entire computers.

I work in IT and grew up in a locksmith/car repair shop where I got my hands dirty very early on. I got my DIY/repair attitude from my father who does almost anything by himself - building and maintaining houses, making furniture, metal work, vehicle maintenance. So that is also deeply rooted in me.

It's not uncommon in my circle to DIY, mostly as a hobby, to save money or because availability of craftsmanship is so poor (waiting months to get someone to do it).

I really like to get broken stuff, fix it and then use or sell it. Such work leaves you with a broad knowledge, and also who is designing repairable machines. Old style italian espresso machines come to my mind. While only some components are standardized (piping, thermostats, portafilters, e61 brew group) many proprietary components needed for repairs are still openly sold on 3rd party stores on the Internet. Sometimes the schematic is also published. The newer and more integrated plastic machines are less of a joy to work on, alas. That's mostly toss-and-rebuy gear.

Before I buy anything, I check maintainability first. Parts availability, hackability, etc. Glued stuff, soldered on chips (formerly RAM, wifi, CPUs etc), nonswappable batteries, hard cloud dependencies and similar scaries me.

Unfortunately, the one exception to above is laptop & phone, where I buy Apple products because they are just clearly the superior option, but unfortunately are not very repairable at all. Nonetheless, I kept my iPhone 8 going until just recently where I finally bumped to an iPhone 14 Pro, and I have kept my 2013 MacBook Pro going and am still using it, although it may be replaced soon.

I really wish things were built to be repairable, but like you I have long suspected (and cursed) the engineers who design products have never actually tinkered with them so don't even consider this as part of the design. They are only optimized for assembly because there is a business cost reason to do so, but repairability doesn't matter to them.

It just takes the form of nobody wanting to inherit someone else's project. Nobody wants maintenance tasks, everyone wants to do green-field development or if they must inherit some existing product they quickly conclude a rewrite from scratch is necessary.

I too have a scrappy hands-dirty DIY IRL history starting with childhood. When I entered the software industry after years of sysadminning, it became very clear my enthusiasm for facing existing complexities head-on was somewhat unique among my peers as well.

But I think this is a more general struggle everyone encounters in life; it's always more attractive to create new problems than solve existing ones. (I'm pretty sure that's a quote I've heard/read at some point, but its origin escapes me)

Some examples from other domains:

Relationships (my mate and I are arguing and I've been sleeping on the couch, my OkCupid profile just notified me; cheat)

Automobiles (my car needs tires, brakes, a paint job, and thorough cleaning, the car dealership down the road is having a sale; new car loan)

Living spaces and projects/hobbies (the closet is an unmitigated disaster area, I can't even open its door anymore, but the spare bedroom is empty and I need to start a new project rather than finish any of the dozen abandoned ones occupying said closet; new projects in spare room until it too overflows) This starts to look like hoarding, but it's really just backing down from solving existing problems in favor of making new ones.

The list goes on, I'm sure you can come up with a bunch of examples yourself.

Starting anew is an immediate gratification, anything else, not so much until you make forward progress which almost certainly will be a slog since the immediate gratification low hanging fruit phase was already burned by either past you or someone else altogether.

Personally I find it far more rewarding to resolve existing difficult problems, especially now that I have so much experience that whenever I start anew I'm fully aware that I'm likely making problems future me will have to deal with. Existing problems usually have a bunch of evidence to scrutinize and inform what you're doing to make meaningful progress. Real problem solving. Creating from scratch is problem making.

Honestly I suspect it comes down to a sort of anxiety about failure.

Nope, i beg to differ. The appeal is built too, it's no secret that our global retail economy is largely driven by marketing and communication, since ww2. Hence it's driven by producers and not by consumers: these criteria are what producers want consumers to want. Which they largely managed to assert. Mass media, mass consumption, all this is guided from the top, not the bottom. Surely there is nuance, the top-down control strives to test if it's not too far from something that would actually be appealing to the bottom. But the main driving force here is to pump up the volume, and to do so by creating markets, by forcefully pushing goods onto consumers habits and by making things short-lived (using forced obsolescence, but more commonly and insidiously by producing pointless new versions all the time). Actually once you go down that path, you see that the whole underpinnings of "consumer"/"producer" duality is biased towards this state of affairs. It's no wonder Marx babbled about taking over the means of productions (and ipso facto destroying passive consumption as a practice). Even Knuth says that the only proper way to make any tool is to design it for your own use (can't remember out the source for this one, probably something about TeX). This is a major reason for grassroots software domination against corporate products, despite the ridiculous imbalance.

And secondly, why? The pollution this kind of thinking generates is mind boggling and as everyone is becoming aware, we’re running out of time to avoid disaster.

So, really, why?

I worked on England's waste strategy published back in 2000. The waste hierarchy back then was "Reduce, Reuse, Refurbish, Recycle" - the promotional focus at the time was on recycling (our recycling rates were abysmal), but maintenance ( == Refurbish) was definitely part of the mix.