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Permanent Record (Chapter 2, pp. 27-28)

"To his peers, my father was a master electronics systems engineer
 who specialized in avionics.  To me, he was a household mad 
scientist who'd try to fix everything himself - electrical 
outlets, dishwashers, hot-water heaters, and AC units.  I'd 
work as his helper whenever he'd let me, and in the process 
I'd come to know both the physical pleasures of manual work 
and the intellectual pleasures of basic mechanics, along with 
the fundamental principles of electronics  - the differences 
between voltage and current, between power and resistance.  
Evey job we undertook together would end either in a 
successful act of repair or a curse, as my father would fling 
the unsalvageable piece of equipment across the room and into 
the cardboard box of things-that-can't-be-unbroken.  I never 
judged him for these failures - I was always too impressed by 
the fact that he had dared to hazard an attempt.

When he returned home and found out what I'd done to the NES, 
he wasn't angry, much to my surprise.  He wasn't exactly 
pleased, either, but he was patients.  He explained that 
understanding why and how things had gone wrone was every bit 
as important as understanding what component had failed: 
figuring out the why and how would let you prevent the same 
malfunction from happening again in the future.  He pointed 
to each of the console's parts in turn, explaining not just 
what it was, but what it did, and how it interacted with all 
the other parts to contribute to the correct working of the 
mechanism.  Only by analyzing a mechanism in its individual 
parts were you able to determine whether its design was the 
most efficient to achieve its task.  If it was the most 
efficient, just malfunctioning, then you fixed it.  But if 
not, then you made modifications to improve the mechanism.  
This was the only proper protocol for repair jobs, according 
to my father, and nothing about it was optional - in fact, 
this was the fundamental responsibility you had to 
technology.

Like all my father's lessons, this one had broad applications 
beyond our immediate task.  Ultimately, it was a lesson in 
the principle of self-reliance, which my father insisted that 
America had forgotten sometime between his own childhood and 
mine.  Ours was now a country in which the cost of replacing 
a broken machine with a newer model was typically lower than 
the cost of having it fixed by an expert, which itself was 
typically lower than the cost of sourcing the parts and 
figuring out how to fix it yourself was perpetuated not by 
the technology itself but by the ignorance of everyone who 
used it daily and yet failed to understand it.  To refuse to 
inform yourself about the basic operation and maintenance of 
the equipment you depended on was to passively accept the 
tyranny and agree to its terms: when your equipment works, 
you'll work, but when your equipment breaks down you'll break 
down too.  Your possessions would possess you."

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