Goodreads Bookshelf
All the Fixin's
Well over a year ago, a certain puppy who shall remain nameless decided that the padding on the inside of my boots would taste really good. She ripped all the padding that goes against the achilles tendon right out of one and made a start on the other before her new favorite candy was taken away. I suffered through them for quite a while, which was easy enough since I don't wear boots that often. A couple months ago, I found a boot/shoe repair store and took them in. For maybe $20 I got both of the boots fixed, which I didn't think was too bad considering the boots cost somewhere between $80-$100 new.
There was a minor problem with the fix, however: on one of the boots, something was rubbing up against my achilles. I took it back to the store and they tried really hard to fix it and more or less succeeded. No additional charge. Anyway, I really liked this idea of actually getting something fixed. Our culture is so geared toward "ending is better than mending" that it's nice when we actually can fix something and continue using it, even if it does have some deleterious effect on the economy. It may not be supporting corporations, but it does support some shoe repairman and his family, and I think in the end I'd rather support that kind of local and skilled sector of the economy anyway.
For a few months now, my digital camera has been broken--the lens that comes out to play when the camera's turned on got stuck halfway between open and shut. I guess it's a fairly frequent problem with the Canon Powershot, which is otherwise a pretty good, inexpensive camera. I dawdled and finally took it in to Best Buy today after looking for a camera repair shop. None of them do any in-house work--it's all farmed out and takes 6-8 weeks. Looking up the problem on-line, one person said he'd taken his camera to Best Buy and the guy fixed it right there, and since I'd bought it from Best Buy anyway, I figured I'd give it a shot.
Well, the Geek Squad couldn't fix it in-house (must have been a special Geek that guy found), but at least it's usually more like 1-2 weeks. It's a shame that there isn't someone doing this locally, because it really seems like something that a knowledgeable, capable person could fix in an hour (if not just a few minutes). It's so minor. But such places don't really seem to exist, and probably the people making cameras and such things don't want them to exist. A few centralized places mean more of a monopoly on doing the fixing and it also means that it's just inconvenient enough that some people won't bother and will just get a new camera or whatever it is.
The kicker to this story is that, although I'd forgotten about it, when I bought the camera I bought a service plan on it for four years, probably the best plan they offered. It expired in March, which I'm fairly sure was after my camera broke. ::sigh::