loose screws
…it’s rained for eight straight days here in New England, and if I don’t see some sunlight soon, I’m going to shoot myself in the fucking face. Yeah, that’ll learn you, Mother Nature. Yeah.
I have never in my life taken apart anything electronimalogical and then had the correct number of screws go back in. I don’t know where they go, but they go. Here’s a tip I heard that when I heard it, I thought, “say, that’s a good tip”: use a muffin pan to keep track of your loose screws. Put the screws in little round muffin tins, farther away from you as you go. That way you have all your screws and whatnot in one place, and they are organized by the order in which you pulled them out. Having relayed this tip, I can also relay that I have never actually done this — I have eaten muffins, though, so it’s still very relevant.
Here’s something I *have* done; if you’re yanking wires out of something and you’re worried that you might not remember which color wire goes to what part of the gizmo, take a couple digital camera pictures for yourself as you go. Trust me, they do come in handy when you can’t remember if it was the orange wire or the orange and white striped wire that hooked up to jumper J40. Also, make sure to keep the bus at a speed faster or equal to 60 MPH as you go.
I took apart my Yamaha electric piano tonight and it was extraordinarily satisfying to do so; there’s been an acoustic speaker buzz ever since I bought it. I had to pry apart the whole damn thing to remove one-sixteenth of an inch of useless speaker grill foam. But: it sounds great now. I sound great playing it. It’s win-win for both of us.
Which brings me to my point, and I didn’t have one when I started but I do now; $0.0001 worth of defective foam was ruining an otherwise wonderful $1,000+ instrument. And I knew exactly what it was that was wrong with it from day one, I’ve just been lazy for three years and I didn’t want to dissassemble the whole damn thing just to pull that $0.0001 worth of foam out. I’m almost supernaturally good at figuring out — just by looking and touching an object — what is *wrong* with it and then, inversely, how it could be made *better*.
So here’s the deal, defective manufacturers of the world; fly me out (business class is fine!), put me up in a hotel (Doubletree is fine!), and lead me blindfolded into your clean rooms stocked high with the Future Defective Products of America. In return, I will let you in on what $0.0001 change you can make that will make your product twice as good. That’s my defective pledge to you.
~jeff