Garage Monkeys. That is how Pirsig and Crawford describe them. Each writes about a different species: Pirsig about repair techs who lack arete and Crawford about the middle managers who stand between vehicle owners and vehicle repair techs. They are adjacent parts of the modern automotive service-shop organization and both offend something at my core. …
It’s one of my favorite parts of a repair job: a symbolic transition, instantiated in the physical act of switching the ratchet from “loosen” to “tighten.” In terms of the sense of satisfaction it brings, it is rivaled only by the moment a newly-repaired mechanism starts and operates properly again for the first time. For …
I want to write about grading – but not the kind of grading that results in scores or letters A-F (excluding, for whatever reason, ‘E’). I have something to say about a kind of grading few people think about anymore – and even fewer understand. If you have lived your life on paved roadways, you …
Eddie Van Halen died a couple of weeks ago. What follows is, I suppose, something of a tribute to him – though that is not why I wrote it. I had actually written this more than a year ago and it has been waiting for me to make space to do something with it. It …