A Man, A Fan, A Plan

It was about 25 years ago that Rachel and I, soon to be wed, bought one of the worst automobiles ever to emerge from the hearts and minds of Detroit. It was a car so terrible that going through a list of its deficiencies would try the patience of even the most saintly and sympathetic. But this long gone piece of Detroit rubbish had something in common with my whiz-bang Dell laptop computer: both were built around a fan.
In the case of our car, we had a distinct advantage: Dave, The Mechanic, who worked a block from Rachel’s office back then, was on retainer, or so it seemed. The car was in his shop every month, so that he could cure one ailment or another. Replacing the heater fan was particularly trying, not just because the car, as I said, seemed to have been built around the fan, but when he was lying on his back, grappling with some particularly recalcitrant segment of the dashboard substructure, a mouse leaped down on him and ran across his body, causing his body to react with the marvelous reflexes which every good mechanic should possess, hurling his head with great force into a steel crosspiece. Dave, The Mechanic, then took some time away from the car. I’m not sure whether we paid for that time off or not. But at the end of the day, the dead blower fan had been replaced with a freshly transplanted working model, and the car had to go back to the drawing board and think of some new problem to confound him the following month.
In the case of my computer, it became clear over time that the cooling fan was wearing out. All computers have fans in them to dissipate the heat which is generated by operation, mostly from the central processing unit. And it stands to reason that something that runs every minute that the computer is on, something that *moves*, might be prone to wearing out and necessitating replacement. Thus, a good engineer might choose to design the machine so that all that would be required to replace the fan would be the removal of a couple of screws, followed by unsnapping the old unit and snapping in a new one. Total time spent, maybe two minutes.
But no.
In order to replace the fan on my machine, complete disassembly is required, and I do mean complete. The keyboard, the wrist rest, the screen, the battery, the cd drive, the hard drive, the ram, the CPU, all that and more have to be removed. The procedure is twenty pages long. And after you get to the end of it, and have replaced the blessed thing, it all has to be reassembled. If We were the King, We would not be Amused.
So this is a combination complaint and warning. The complaint you have heard and the warning is this: If Time Goes By without Freshness on this page, it will Most Likely be because The Machine is scattered in Pieces On The Dining Table, waiting for me to make another attempt at getting it through the forty pages of disassembly and reconstruction. I have the new fan, sitting in a little box, waiting for its day in the spotlight. That day is not yet here, but as the current fan increases its propensity to squeal and grate, that day draws nearer and when it comes, you’ll hear about it. I’m just not sure when....