My dad can fix just about anything. I think most people probably feel this way about their dad, especially when they’re five and their dad displays a modicum of skill at gluing things, but I’m hurtling toward 30 and the sentiment persists: yesterday I was out there and he was showing me his progress on an industrial-scale wood gassifier he’s building out in the barn, demonstrated with a foot-long flume of near-invisible hydrogen flame. It’s good he can fix anything; he’ll probably blow my childhood home into the stratosphere eventually.
Growing up he was always fixing someone’s stereo or TV or dehumidifier or car or computer. When I was little him soldering new capacitors into circuit boards of his own device sort of blended together with him soldering capacitors into someone else’s circuit boards; fixing or building things was just what he did, and had been doing since he was like 10. I guess when I was a kid I figured, like everyone else must’ve figured, that he just liked doing it.
My dad’s recently retired. Before that, though, he was an industrial electrician for 30 years, fixing somewhat bigger stuff at a can plant. He definitely didn’t like doing that, but at least he got paid. Most of the time, when he was fixing someone’s Playstation, he was doing it out of a sense of obligation; it was always friends and family who just happened to bring along some busted hunk of shit in the back seat of their car that “maybe he could look at.”
What he liked doing was innovating; making something new or arriving at an old destination via a different route. He didn’t stick a conventional turbine on the roof when he wanted wind power; he trial-and-errored through developing a vertically-bladed contraption with reactively shifting vanes dependent on wind speed and direction. He liked doing his own thing.
I know how he feels.
I’m not much for machining or circuit design — I dropped anything resembling an electronics course after AC Fundamentals in school — but I’m a passable hand at drawing things. And I am tired of designing your tattoo or band T-shirt or business card or photography company logo for free because you are my cousin or my boyfriend’s former co-worker. If I want to toil endlessly at artistic bitchwork for zero financial compensation I’ll work on my comics.
