There’s something uniquely satisfying for me in making something work. I rediscovered that fact over this weekend with my car.
A couple of words about this vehicle. It’s served well for about 130,000 miles without too many major complaints. Until this year, any problems have been cosmetic or normal wear and tear. Recently, though, it’s required a new alternator, battery, starter, muffler, and a host of other minor annoyances. The worst has been a series of mysterious ailments in the electrical system. Over the past few months, one thing after another has just stopped working—the radio, dome light, alarm sounds, rear defroster, and the power seatbelts. I’d resigned myself to this trend continuing, especially after two different mechanics had thrown their hands up and declared that just finding the problem would take at least 10 hours of labor. For a vehicle I plan to replace relatively soon, that’s more than I’m willing to shell out.
Still, I do have the occasional moment of frustration. I hit this point yesterday when the air conditioner abruptly stopped working in the 93 degree Chicago weather. After swearing copiously, I took an inventory of what I knew about the problem, which wasn’t much. I briefly considered standing knowledgeably over the open hood, but dismissed the idea. Setting aside the fact that it wouldn’t do any good, it was still marginally cooler in the car than it was out of it.
I figured I had three choices—give up and sweat, call someone who knows something about cars, or see if there was anything I could do that wouldn’t do me bodily harm even if it didn’t help. Knowing as little as I do about my vehicle (I’ve changed the oil myself exactly once, and even that was under close supervision), the only thought I had was that it might, maybe, just be a blown fuse. Happily, the toolbox in my trunk has a few spares. So I bravely exposed myself to the sun, retrieved the fuses from the trunk, and at the same time realized that it was now warmer in the car than in the world at large.
I started dinking around with the fuse box, marveling for a moment at the ingenious design of the little plastic tool used to remove and insert the fuses. I imagine a brilliant engineer designed that item after either three months or twelve minutes of effort. I’m awed by people who can create a physical object like that, because my own mind is completely unsuited to the task.
Forcing myself back to “work”, I let out what I hoped was an appropriate sounding grunt and looked at the inside of the fuse box cover to see what went where. It took about ten seconds to see the fuse for the A/C was the 7th from the top on the left side, and another several minutes to count to 7 correctly (keep in mind, it was hot and I was still impressed with the fuse removal device). I pulled out the 15-amp fuse, looked it over although I have no idea what it would look like if it was blown, and turned to my supply of spares. Just as you’d expect, no 15 amp spares. 10s and 20s, but none of the kind I needed.
“Well, hell. Now what?” I muttered, knowing my bright ideas were pretty much at an end. On a whim, I looked at the diagram again, and saw that there was a 15-amp fuse installed for the remote-controlled mirrors. Now, my car’s only mirror doesn’t even have a mechanical control from the inside. If you want to adjust it, you have to roll the window down and move it by hand. So I yanked that fuse out, inserted it into the A/C slot, held my breath and started the car back up.
Eureka! Cold, chemically treated air poured out of the vents, comforting me even as it polluted the environment for future generations. Realizing how easy that had been, I decided to look at a few others as well. Ten minutes and two fuses later, I had a working dome light, annoying buzzers to tell me the door was ajar, and seatbelts that disengaged on command even without the engine running. No radio, but even so the creature comforts of the car had jumped by a factor of three.
Okay, so what’s the point here other than some vaguely deserved self-congratulation? The point for me is, sometimes what you need is a little critical thinking and an understanding of what you know and don’t know. Every now and again, you can solve a problem without knowing all you’d like to about the situation. For me, it was a matter of knowing that trying what little I could think of couldn’t make the situation any worse. The investment of a little time gave me at least some chance of fixing the problem. As it turned out, I solved much more than I’d even hoped to.
And isn’t that so often the case? Take a self-directed tutorial to learn how to use a new piece of software, and a chance mention about one of the shortcut keys saves you time with other programs, too. Pick up a book by an unfamiliar author, and you not only love that story, you discover it’s the first part of a series you’re suddenly eager to read. Approach a problem at work by trying to take care of it yourself, and suddenly you have a reputation as an independent employee. All of these things happen only if you rely on your own judgment to try something yourself before seeking assistance. Many times, doing a good thing now is more effective than someone else doing the perfect thing later.
Often, our efforts don’t solve the problem we set out to fix. If we take any kind of lesson from the effort, though, it hasn’t gone unrewarded. Practice this enough, and you just may find you have tools at your disposal you never imagined.
22 July 2001