Today I’m in NYC and I arrive to a busted microwave. Actually I didn’t discover it was broken; a buddy of mine stayed at my place a few weeks back and found it was busted – well he put these soy burgers in there and they probably overloaded it hahah. (Just kidding.)
Anyways, you can’t live in NYC without a microwave. In the city of takeout/delivery, how can you not reheat something instantly?
So I call the handyman guy in my building and he comes over to take a look. He says to me that all you gotta do is take out the circuit board and re-solder everything on it. He says that sometimes over time, cooking oil can cause the soldered joints to become non-conductive since the microwave sits over the range. He proceeds to unscrew the board and takes it away.
A few minutes later, he comes back with the fixed board. He reinstalls it and then turns it on and, WOW, it works. UNBELIEVABLE.
It reminds me of my dad. Once he gets me to come over because his big screen TV is busted. He gets me to go behind the TV and unscrew the back and take out the circuit board. I give him the circuit board and he looks at it for a minute and then points to a transformer (one of 100 components on this board) and says, “I think this is broken. We need to replace this.” I look at him in wonder. How the f*ck did he know that was broken? He goes upstairs and finds a spare transformer (oh a random spare transformer upstairs in his bedroom…) and comes back down. He hands it to me and tells me to unsolder the old one and put in the new one.
My skills do include soldering so I whip out my handy dandy soldering iron and replace it pronto, but all the while wondering “WTF this can’t be the problem…?” I take the circuit board and put it back into the TV. I replace the back panel and plug it in, and IT WORKS.
I think about when my father learned electronics. Back then, electronics were simpler. Radios and stuff were just easier to put together and fix and none of these integrated circuits. Lots of big tubes and transformers and things that you didn’t need a microscope to see. You learned their theory, and how they worked together, and you could pretty much build a radio from scratch.
Look at me. I went through many electrical engineering classes in college and I can’t fix crap. What a waste of an education. I pay all this money to learn the same stuff that my dad learns and I can’t do anything with it. Can’t fix a TV or a microwave. I AM WORTHLESS.