This moming I had the passenger window on my 1979 Ford Grenada replaced. The window had shattered a few days before when my 8-year-old daughter closed the door with vigor and authority. Kibitzing with the glass man as he went about his trade, we both wondered whether or not any future displays of similar zeal would have identical consequences. Working through this mundane puzzle led to the discovery of a crink in the liner of the door frame, the liner in which the window sits when it is fully rolled up. This crink could possibly cause the window to slip off its normal course when going up and down in the door frame. Within the door itself was a speaker with a hard metal frame and when the window was rolled down, as it was when it cracked, the plate of glass may have rested loosely against the speaker such that it was merely a matter of time before one slam of the door would be too many. So, with the installation of a new window, out came the old speaker and out came the wrinkle in the door liner. Part replaced, system restored. Perhaps.
Ordinary repair? I would like to think so. However, after reading Douglas Harper's unassuming but convincing Working Knowledge, I see the ordinariness of such everyday matters in a new light. Had I taken the car to the Ford agency out on the strip, there to be whisked back out of sight to a specialist in the auto glass stall for its damage repair, I surely would have gotten a new window but I fear little repair. In the language Harper carefully develops, my car would have been treated by a "parts exchanger" not a "parts fixer." This distinction is crucial to the book and stands as a powerful way of thinking about all forms of modem repair from the mechanical to the biological, from the plumber's trade to the doctor's.
Harper's tale concerns a self-employed mechanic, an engineer, a body man, a fix-it man, a tinkerer, a junk dealer, an inventor, all rolled into one * Douglas Harper, Working knowledge: Skill and community in a small shop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. 214 pages with index and photographs. $29.95 (cloth).