Mobile Electronics Repair

The DH heard this story on NPR this week and told me about it – he was fascinated by the major aspect of the story: A guy turning a personal need into a business that is growing like crazy – a mobile ‘small personal electronics repair’ business. From the description above, of people coming up to his van to ask for help when they see the advertising on the side, another thought comes through.

This is the 21st Century version of a hot dog cart. Or the late 19th or early 20th century pushcart guys found in every major city. “Strawberries!!” “Rags..Rags..we buy Rags!!” “Pots and Pans – we fix pots and pans!”

The other thought is this: In the midst of what some economists claim to be the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, some people have found a way to build a small business based on repairs, which is a very ancient profession indeed.

People who can repair stuff have a skill that is very useful when times are bad because – people are not in the financial situation where they feel comfortable just throwing something away and buying new. Before the ‘throw away economy’ was produced by the Wal-Martization of manufactured goods (and Wal-Mart is not the only ‘villain’ of the piece here – I fully admit that), there were a lot of things that due to the way they were designed and manufactured and the amount of their cost, people would have them fixed. Electronics such as television sets and stereos, shoes, clothing, electronic appliances, small engine goods such as mowers were all the basis of a thriving sector of the economy: Service and Repair.

The cheapening of practically all goods basically put that out of people’s minds. When it costs almost as much (or perhaps even more) to repair than what the item could be purchased for, then it made no monetary sense (we won’t discuss the whole issue of ‘life time cost’ which includes disposal and landfilling) to have something repaired – it only made sense to throw it away and buy something new..whether it was a pair of shoes, a tee shirt, a pair of blue jeans, a toaster, or a laptop.

What Leontaris (and others who are doing the same thing) has found out is that there are a lot of broken small electronics around with owners who actually just want the damn thing repaired. People have become so dependent on their personal electronics that having the item out of their possession for even a couple of days causes upset(how many people do you know who actually wear a wrist watch now? How many people do you know who turn off their cell phones to go on vacation? How many people do you know who have repetitive motion disorder from using their PDA? How many people do you know who refer to their PDA as ‘a Crackberry’).

The other thing is this: The prices of some of these items new have now become high enough that having to replace it now is going to cause a certain amount of ‘wallet pain’.

Enough so that repairing an Iphone makes sense. Even when repairing a cracked screen will set the person back – 10 minutes of time…and $99.00 for parts and service (which is what Leontaris charges). Enough so that Leontaris not only has this mobile business, but a shop where techs repair other items such as laptops and so on that he can’t keep the parts in his van.

I’ve talked before about businesses that got their start or got really growing in the Great Depression. One of the biggest and most famous is HP – Hewlett Packard, which got its start in the Depression in Mr. Hewlett’s garage. In my local area, a safety pin business which was struggling even before the depression (basically because they were trying to compete in what had become a commodity market), took the opportunity to morph themselves into a tool and die manufacturer, which survived on holding the line on costs. They then evolved into an electronics ‘pick and place’ machinery and systems manufacturer and now they are all over the world. Their headquarters is still in my home town here.

Things are very bad right now – let’s not make any mistake. But for people who are interested in ‘finding a need and filling it’ – now is as good – or as bad – a time to start a business as any. Who knows, perhaps you could be someone who can be a success, help people with their needs, and make more jobs for others.

Now THAT’s a plan we can all get behind.

(Ipod clinic photo by Dan Theurer)

The best part of the job, though, was when we were able to place people into jobs. Most of what we did in those days was what was coyly referred to in the jargon of the agency business as ‘temp to perm’ (of course now, it’s more than likely ‘perma-temp’), so I knew that when I asked someone about their business and what was the one person I could find for them that would help them grow, that if I was able to find that person, I was doing a definite ‘good deed’ – I was getting that person a job.

A paycheck. A way to buy groceries and get health benefits for themselves and their family, pay the bills, pay their rent or mortgage. A way for someone to maybe even get a promotion and a raise in pay.

Despite the pay (which was actually not the greatest), I loved that job. I saw it as a homely combination of ‘good deed’ and ‘local economic development’. No matter how frustrating the cold calls or unanswered phone messages were, I always felt that what I was doing was good. At the end of the day, there were people who were genuinely better off for what I was doing.

Right now, there are a tremendous number of people in this country who are NOT better off than they were a year ago. For some of them, their bad times started several years ago and their jobs got offshored someplace or downsized out of existence. And they’ve had to take whatever they can get and it’s probably less than what they made before. And to pay the bills and the mortgage and the orthodonture, they’ve taken on huge levels of debt and whatever job they could find. And for a lot of them, an increasing number have lost their homes and are wandering the countryside, like high tech (and sometimes low tech) Tom Jodes.

And I know there are people out there who feel that it’s ‘all their own faults’ or ‘if they’d kept up they’d still have a job’ or ‘if they’d been smart…” or ‘if they’d worked harder’ or …and so on. And I can tell you, because I come from a place where our local economy was run on the fly-wheel of a huge high tech wonder..which decided one day that they no longer wanted to be in the business that they ran in our little place (and thereby causing over 20,000 people to lose their jobs), that for many many people in this country, they did work very hard, and were very educated and smart, and they did keep up with training, and they did the best they could for their families and their community.
And it didn’t make any difference because it was decisions made thousands of miles away by people who did not care about the families and the community – that is what caused them to lose their jobs.

And for many people at the top of the heap out there, that is an appropriate thing – free market competition, movement of capital and assets to the lowest cost areas and so on and so forth. But for the millions of people who are either now out of work or who have not been able to get a job in their fields for the last 5 years, it is not an appropriate thing.

It is bitter and it is demeaning and it sucks the very life out of the soul of people and of a community and out of the country.

And right now, we have an administration which really is struggling to do something right. It might not be what all of us admire or believe in or accept or agree with. But they really are trying to do the most good for the most people, because that is what is required now. But the economy is not responding, at least at the community and personal levels, the way people need. Because..people need jobs. There are millions of people out of work already..and this spring, there are millions more young people who are graduating from colleges and graduate schools..and they don’t have jobs either.

And maybe Aunt Toby’s readers do a lot of charity work already, and for that I thank you sincerely. But at the moment, charity is not just what we need. What we have the greatest need for right now are industrial and commercial patriots.

The greatest, most patriotic thing anyone who owns or manages a business can do right now is not to lay off workforce – ask your employees to find ways to save money, work smarter, to keep everyone working and paid. Additionally, if you can find a place in your operation, an even greater good would be to find one person who can help you grow and hire that person. Even if it is a young person with little experience but a lot of energy. Even if you are a plumber and all the young person could do would be to crouch next to you and learn. To give one additional person a job, teach them a skill, give them the opportunity to help you grow and be more productive and competitive – that would help your business..would help the economy…would help the country.

And all you bankers who got the bail outs – it’s time for you to step up and start lending to business. We all know that you are hoarding the money that the tax payers gave to you. Many of you are using it to buy up other distressed banks. The country needs you to be patriotic too – help business grow – give them credit.

A lot of talk out there about patriotism revolves around the phrase ‘love of country’ – we need to love the people in the country, too. And for that, we need to help business grow, so that they can hire people HERE so that payrolls flow out into the community and help other businesses in the communities. That is when people at the local level will honestly know..in their very bones..that the recession is over.
(photos courtesy of diP and Joan Thewlis)

Well, sometimes, Aunt Toby feels that way about KCE. I have to make sure to keep some of the ongoing things up in the air and revisiting them from time to time before they..well, they won’t go smash on the floor, but the story may not be fresh or interesting any longer and all of my little buggers might lose interest.

So, this post is a bit of a catch up.

Chicks: Well, as we saw last time, they stopped being chicks a very long time ago and are now pullets and cockerels and are now behaving a lot more chicken-y. The cockerels are getting quite annoying for the pullets now, and by the end of July, the pullets will have turned, magically, into hens and will start laying eggs, which means that they need places to lay those eggs IN..nesting boxes.

The DH, having gone through the experience of building the first chicken ‘tractor’ felt that he’d worked out the bugs from that and was now ready to build a ‘new and improved’ tractor complete with nesting boxes. No white wall tires, electric windows or automatic watering devices. In any case, no matter what, we would have two tractors and could theoretically pick and choose our way through our little flock to find the boys and the girls so that we could for sure get the girls into the ‘condo’ with the best roosters and leave the rest of the boys in the first tractor. You would think that knowing a boy chicken from a girl chicken would be the easiest thing going, and for the most aggressive and sexually mature cockerels, it is pretty easy: they are the biggest ones with the combs and wattles. It is a lot harder to select out the least mature cockerels, whose combs have not really started to develop and who do NOT have wattles. But we had to do it, if only for the space factor. There are all sorts of types of combs; our chickens because they were bred for cold northern winters, have what’s called a ‘pea comb’ which is teeny and lays close to the head. In the photograph, you have what people think of as a rooster with a comb – the farther south the chickens are, the better it is for them to have a big upstanding comb like this one because..combs radiate heat out of a chicken’s body. Those red things under the rooster’s chin are what are called ‘wattles’ and I have no idea what their function is, if anything.

As lonely as that sounds, it is not a whole lot of fun to be the cockerel who is NOT the biggest or best because that means that you are constantly being picked on, being shouldered away from the food, and being pecked. You are, as the saying goes, at the bottom of the ‘pecking order’. The ‘last guy’ as it were, is really in tough shape. So, by taking out the biggest (which turns out to be the most aggressive, most sexually mature, nastiest and so on) roosters out of the flock to put in with the pullets, it was as if we had completely reshuffled the deck for the rest of the roosters. They immediately got a lot more room than they had been able to occupy before, had less competition for the food, and a whole new pecking order had to be established. This did not, however, help the little guy at the bottom of the heap; frankly, he is still at the bottom of the heap but he will be able to avoid being pecked a bit more, be able to get a bit more food and will grow a little better and a little bit faster now.

It will also mean that he will probably be the last to go ‘a la Pepperoniville’ as we say at Chez Siberia. But I’m sure that being the last to ‘turn off the lights’ is not going to be much of a compensation for a lifetime of being the guy at the bottom of the totem pole.

The Garden: One of the things about gardening here in Upstate New York is the telescoping nature of time. We really do not get a very long spring, so keeping up with harvesting early things like lettuce and spinach becomes a race against the plants’ bolding as the days get longer and warmer. Needless to say, we have eaten spinach in as many permutations and combinations as I can think of, though I think I might just blanch and freeze the rest to use during the winter when I make my own pasta.

Pick Your Own: Aunt Toby and Elder Daughter will be returning tomorrow to the strawberry farm to pick…snap peas, actually. They are rushing in and are still nice and flat and not woody. My plan is to pick several pounds, blanch a little bit and freeze them in seal-a-meal pouches for use in asian dishes this winter.

The Economy: I don’t care what the pundits are saying – it’s still stinko.
And that is all you need to know.

Anyone who has a child who graduated from college this spring (as we did at Chez Siberia)knows that the overwhelming majority of these kids (unless they are engineers, computer programmers or accountants) are unemployed at the moment. My son’s estimate (backed up by a college intern we have at our office) is that only 1 of his friends had a job by the time he left school and that most of his friends opted to try to get into graduate school to sit out the recession. The Boy has a job for the summer but is looking…and competing with people with much more experience than he has.

We have assured him that Chez Siberia will not be going into the boarding house business any time soon and that he still has his bed to sleep in. However, by the end of the summer, we will no longer be able to cover him with our health insurance (hey people; write your Congressional Reps and Senators and DEMAND health care reform with a public offering). Luckily, New York State has a program that will allow him to buy his own insurance coverage at a not horrible rate.

If you have a child who graduated and is not going on to graduate school, you will need to check out what is available in your state to keep your kid covered — they are only covered for 90 days after their date of graduation. Trust me – for some reason, they can go through an entire four years of college with no more problems than an attack of acne…and as soon as their coverage lapses, something will happen and they will need major healthcare or dental work.

(rooster photo courtesy of nal in miami Juggler photo courtesy of Robbie Veldwijk)

Write down, in no particular order, your friends. They don’t have to be close friends, just all the people who you interact with on a regular basis: clubs, organizations, church, work, your kids’ school, etc. Get ‘em all down.

Then take out a different a marker or highlighter™ or a different color pen and somehow designate the people on that list that you currently work with or who perhaps you used to work with but who still work in the same company or organization that you do. Then take out a different marker and put a check mark next to all the people on that list who you do ‘other stuff’ with (go for coffee, movies, drinks, clubs, etc. ).

How many people on your list are people you work with AND also socialize or do ‘other stuff’ with? If more than half of them are, then you’ve got work to do….hard work…adult work…work you probably have not had to do in decades.

You’ve got to make some friends.

Don’t laugh. Making friends is hard work. Think of how kids make friends at school or in the neighborhood – there are delicate negotiations (would you like some of my cookie?), deal making (I’ll trade you this for that), and diplomacy. Most of us end up with most of our friends from work because – those friends don’t take any work on our parts – they are just there. And we become very comfortable in terms of making them part of our lives. I know people who have literally been friends with the same people at their work since they joined the company decades ago; they and their families do everything now as families: vacations; their kids go to camp together, date one another. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?

Until there is a mass layoff. Then..it sucks..big time.

“After a major downsizing among municipal workers in Finland, the risk of death from a heart attack went up fivefold for those who lost their jobs….. evidence in the United States has been mixed, but research has found that people who lost a job in their 50s were more than twice as likely to have a heart attack or stroke in the next decade.
It’s not just those who lose their jobs who are at risk of serious health problems or premature death. In Finland, even those municipal workers who weren’t actually downsized were more likely to die sooner, says Hadler. In the United Kingdom, the “Whitehall studies” included a glimpse of a group of civil service workers whose jobs were threatened by a planned Thatcher-era privatization. The research found declines in both physical and mental health after the announcement, says Sir Michael Marmot, professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London and the principal investigator for the studies. Research in the United States led by Sarah Burgard, a sociologist at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, has shown that job insecurity can be as bad for your longer-term health as a bout with a serious illness or even an actual job loss.

Job Loss and Health

Now, what these studies looked at was stress and job loss, but I know, because Aunt Toby has been through two swings on this job loss door, that one of the major stressors and depressors is ‘social loss’. If you lose your job and most of your friends are people you work with – they won’t be your friends any more. Instant Leprosy.

Trust me – it’s like getting a divorce; your spouse’s friends are not your friends any longer either. And if there is a mass layoff, then there are two factors going: you all will have lost your jobs, your social culture and will be under those stressors plus– there will be hundreds of you out there scrambling around, looking for a job. That does not make for charitable behaviors, believe me.

Which brings me back to friends.

When you lose your job or if you are in danger of losing your job, the people you need to consult with, talk with, ask for help from, get your resumes into the hands of, network with – should definitely NOT be the people you would have to compete with for jobs. This is not to say that joining a professional society in your local area is not a good idea – as a matter of fact, it is a great idea because you will meet people who do what you do up and down the scale and they are many times your best avenues to getting your resume into the right hands.

But the guy who you share cubical space with, who is married, with three kids, a mortgage, car payments and a three year orthodonture program for his 15 year old? He is definitely NOT going to call you up and say, “Hey, Fred; I heard about a job that I think you’d be more perfect for instead of me.” Trust me – survival of the fittest never included “love thy neighbor”.

So, look at that list. When was the last time you did something new? Joined a new organization? Joined a professional organization? Joined the local branch of your college alumni organization? Checked out Meetup.com? (no, it is not a hooking up site – it’s a way to meet people who are interested in the same stuff you do, whether it is college alumni, professional and technical groups, religious groups and so on – the DC area one, for example goes on for pages and pages and includes everything from knitting and sewing, to college alumni groups, people interested in getting jobs on the Hill, IT professionals interested in fraud investigations, etc. )

Remember what your mom used to tell you on your first day at school? Riiiight…”go make some friends.”

Great for your career – great for your health, too.

(photo courtesy of carf )

This posting can also be found at: Oxdown Gazette at Firedoglake.com