The bulb in our monitor burned out last week. Do'h! We have one of those nice flat screen computer monitors, and we love it. My husband, being ever so handy, figured that he could just replace the bulb and be done with it. The bulbs were very reasonably priced, and we were just about to take off to the store to pick one up when Kirk (now you know his name!) decided to try to take apart the monitor to make sure it would be as easy as he thought it was going to be.
It wasn't.
He got it apart, but not enough to replace the bulb without damaging the wiring and such. He worked on it for a couple of hours, thinking that he was missing something, that surely there was a way to get it apart, but in the end, he decided that replacing the bulb was not going to work, and we were going to have to replace the monitor, not just the bulb.
This experience brings up something that very much bothers me about our society today. Things are not built to be fixed, they are built to be disposable. It just needed a new bulb, one you could buy fairly inexpensively (cheaper than a new monitor, anyway) but it was too difficult to actually make the repair. It just made us sad, and not just because we were going to have to replace the monitor. We just felt awful adding more to a landfill* when it was something that should have been fixable.
*Actually, we freecycled it, but I'm sure it will eventually end up in a landfill!
(sidenote- I will talk about the house later- we're not closing until September 30th, and I am paranoid that it will somehow fall through between now and then, so I don't want to talk too much about it and jinx it until everything is set in stone done.)
2 comments:
I think they call it 'planned obsolescence,' but don't hold me to the spelling of that! You are right--things are made to be thrown away. On the other hand, is it possible a professional might have be able to fix it? On the third hand (yeah, I know--but don't we need a third hand in life sometimes?), the cost of paying said professional would have far outweighed the cost of a new monitor. And don't feel bad about the landfill. Maybe some computer geek is happily fixing the monitor right now, to use with a home-built computer!
Hey, I couldn't agree with you more! My husband is quite handy (like yours) and we are continually frustrated by the type of thing you mention.
His other big frustration is the trend toward all the stores offering the exact same products, which, of course, are never EXACTLY what we are looking for in terms of quality, price, etc.
At least it's comforting to commiserate with you.
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