TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

As a child watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, I remember being amazed by the Everlasting Gobstopper — a candy that a child could suck on forever, and it would never get any smaller. One of them would last a lifetime!

In real life, manufacturers seem to do the opposite: They intentionally design things inexpensively, with an artificially limited lifespan, so they need to be replaced with a newer version. This business strategy has a name: planned obsolescence.

This strategy isn’t new. We know it goes as far back as 1924, when an international group of lightbulb manufacturers called the Phoebus Cartel agreed to limit the life span of bulbs to around 1,000 hours, when they’d lasted much longer before. These people used their power to create dependence, incorporating brokenness into the system.

Today’s poem, though, was built to last.

You Try To Fix It
by Liz Ahl

You take the thing apart to fix it.
Its motor has failed. It was not inexpensive.
Professional repair will cost as much
as the thing itself, so you take the thing apart
to fix it. Or, not fixing it, to at least know
you tried, to at least know better some
of its brokenness, to put your hands inside
its workings, where you might better see
and know what happened, what could happen.
You are optimistic and practical. I watch 
from the other end of the table, I, who am too
afraid or lazy to take a thing apart like that,
too pessimistic to imagine I could fix it.
I’ve seen you fix things, not as I’d have fixed them;
I’ve seen you fail to fix other things but not
regret the trying. I regret the trying in advance,
fearful of the unknown insides of the thing,
wanting a diagram, a special set of tools,
a specified outcome. You are willing to try
to understand the thing with your hands,
with the basic tools you’ve brought upstairs
from the basement where they live mostly
quiet lives. I watch you try to fix the thing,
touching and scrutinizing again and again
its innards of plastic and metal and insulated wire,
its connections and solders, its secret failings.
You are firm and gentle. You are curious, 
but not obsessively so. You want to fix the thing,
but realize you might not. You will know, somehow,
how long to keep trying. Will you pause to think,
as I do here at the other end of the table, about
metaphors, about what it is you know so deeply
about seeing a thing, a person, as best you can,
with your optimistic, practical hands? I think 
of what I’ve broken, of what machine’s gears
I’ve thrown the wrench of myself inside, or just
neglected to maintain, and left for others to fix,
and sometimes it feels like I’m a wrench inside
my own machine. I don’t want to open it up
and look inside, don’t want to touch the tiny wires
and be reminded how little I understand
about how anything works. I only know
that when the machine hummed along it seemed
like I didn’t need to understand anything.

"You Try to Fix It" by Liz Ahl. Originally published in RHINO. Used by permission of the poet.