As some may recall, I wrote a book.
(Still waiting for that call from Oprah…) The book is about how technology has
become democratized and how all technology eventually ends up in the
hands of the masses—and when the masses get hold of it, some great (and also a
few not-so-great) things tend to happen: we build and invent and innovate in
ways the creators of the technology may never have considered.
Well, one of the things the book talks about
is information, and how (due largely to the invention of the computer and
the Internet) information has also been democratized: that is, many,
many more of us have easy access to more information than ever. (We also
democratized misinformation, but that's a subject for another post.)
Simply put, information is now at the fingertips of many more people than ever
before; for those people, laziness is the only reason for not knowing the
answer to any number of factual questions. (A couple of caveats here: First, I realize
that this technology—and therefore this information—is not available to everyone;
there are still plenty of people without decent [or any] Internet access, and
people who can't afford computers. I mean, there are people without access to
decent food and safe water; a MacBook and fast Internet access is WAY down on
their lists. Second, not everything can be answered via the Internet,
and the very definition of "facts" can become a bit fuzzy—especially
when it comes to interpreting those facts. So, I'm no Pollyanna, just so
you know, and I'm not saying that this is, to quote both Voltaire and Kris
Kristofferson, "the best of all possible worlds.")
My granddaughter got to meet Kris
Kristofferson at last summer’s
family
reunion. Too late to meet
Voltaire, I
suppose; maybe I’ll give her a
copy of
Candide.
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But back to information access. It will help
in this exercise for the reader to understand that I'm a dork. A complete
klutz. A home repair disaster on a massive scale. Generally speaking, I can't
build things. I can't fix things. I have built birdhouses in which no
self-respecting bird would ever live. I once installed a garbage disposal in
such a fashion that whenever the disposal turned on, so did the blender on the
nearby counter. I have made multiple trips to Home Depot or Lowes so that I
could buy materials to "fix" a wall or a sink, only to discover that
my feeble attempts at repair, far from saving me money, had actually added
to the final cost, because I then had to hire a pro to undo my repair attempts
so that the wall or sink or whatever could be repaired the right way.
(This is not merely expensive, it's embarrassing.)
Sadly, though I have many friends and several
brothers-in-law who are irritatingly good at this sort of thing, I'm a bit of a
hopeless case.
BUT… I now have access to information. Lots
and lots of information. I have Google, I have YouTube, I have digital access
to a vast network of experts of various stripes, and all of them are positively
eager to tell and even show me how to do stuff. If you enter
"how to" into Google's search field, you get well over 3 billion
results. If you enter "how to build," you get about 244 million.
"How to fix" will net you about 99 million hits or so. If you wander
over to YouTube (which, not surprisingly, is owned by Google) and enter
"how to adjust a carburetor," you'll see that there are some 89,000
videos on the topic. (Which is amazing, considering that cars don’t even use
carburetors anymore. Must be a lot of people repairing lawnmowers, older cars,
and motorcycles.)
Now, you do need to learn to separate the
wheat from the chaff, of course. Not all of these results are useful, accurate,
helpful, or even truthful; but a great majority of them will help you get that wall
built, that truck tuned, or that dishwasher fixed. (My wife once found a random
part lying in our antique dishwasher. It seemed like an important part, the
kind of part that a machine built to wash dishes would need. I was about to call a repair person, but by the time I got
around to it, Lesley had used the Internet to track down the name and purpose
of the part and read up on how to reinstall it. Result, one working dishwasher
and no bill. It was a homeowner's triumph, and a serious savings, although I do
occasionally have to listen to the story of how Lesley fixed the dishwasher
while I dithered.) And the range of topics is incredible; there are almost
500,000 videos on building and setting up a saltwater aquarium! Are there that
many people raising sharks and octopuses and such?
Anyway, we now live in Oregon with Lesley's
mom, and I've made it my goal to be helpful around the house. Up to a point,
this is easy. I can sweep off the deck. (We live in a forest only about 120
yards from the ocean; 8 billion pine needles fall on the house and surrounding
area every time there's a puff of wind.) I can clean and organize. I can haul
and move and drag stuff around.
But the other day, something awful happened.
The kitchen faucet began to leak. It was terrifying. At first, I'd hoped it was
a temporary thing. Maybe it would heal or something. Maybe it was simply
possessed by evil spirits, and they would move on after a few days and go haunt
someone else. (I made a list of people whom I thought could use a good
haunting, and left it near the sink. Didn't seem to do any good.)
It kept leaking. In fact, over the next day
or so, it began leaking worse; obviously something had to be done. I
offered to build a birdhouse for it, but that didn't seem to help. Eventually,
I knew I was going to have to try to fix it.
So, I turned to technology. First, I used
Amazon's shopping app and trained my smartphone's camera on the wayward faucet.
The app recognized the faucet, one of those fancy Moens with no discernible
seams or protuberances, and no obvious way of taking it apart, short of
smashing it with a sledgehammer or wood-splitting maul. (Which I was willing to
do, but it occurred to me that Lesley's mom might not like that idea.)
But now that I knew the make and model, I
went to YouTube and discovered two things: First, these things leak like crazy.
Almost every one of these fancy (and expensive!) faucets eventually leaks. And
second, it's easy to fix the leak! Dozens of YouTubers (I can't type that
without thinking of potatoes) have made videos about how to disassemble Moen
faucets. (There's a trick to it. At the very bottom of the handle is a set
screw, but the opening is hidden by a small plastic cover of the same color as
the faucet. If you pry that off, you can use a 3/32nd Allen wrench—yes, it has
to be a 3/32nd wrench, exactly—to remove the set screw and thus the handle.
Then just tighten the plastic bolt that has come lose, and which is causing the
leak. Keep in mind that it's plastic; don't over-tighten it.)
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One of the dastardly
faucets that caused me so much grief.
Image
courtesy of Moen.
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So, now I'm thinking of building a submarine.
I'm sure there's a YouTube video about how to do that. (Spoiler: I was right.)