Broken Technology

I've just finished reading the book "Surely You must be Joking Mr. Feynman". It is sort of like and autobiography and anecdote collection of a famous nuclear physicist.

One of the first things that Feynman discusses is that as a child he learned how radios worked and became the neighborhoods radio repairman. I was a little bit jealous since I actually don't know the fine details of how radios work. I know the general process, but I don't know the stuff about vacuum tubes and amplifiers.

But then I realized that I had actually learned to fix problems that are much different than he did.

He learned how to look at something that was broken and knew exactly how to fix it because he knew exactly how it worked. Sometimes the problems were hard to find, but he always knew every step in the process.

But in my lifetime I have always been fixing technical issues in our new computer driven age. The difference is that it is truly impossible to know how any of our equipment works. We are supposed to know what connects to where, or what program does what. But all of the components contain thousands or millions of parts and most computer programs are millions of lines of inaccessible code. And all of the information on these topics is badly spread across internet forums, or doesn't really exist anywhere.

What I've discovered, that even though sometimes I won't ever know exactly what is going on, or exactly what was the problem with the device, I will be able to find a solution. It's almost like an intuitive knowledge of this horrible mess of technology that we have that lets me solve issues. It generally takes along time and sometimes doesn't work, but in the long run it has served me well.

Kyler