Random miscellany: the problem with experts

In the general course of my life, I often come across things that I think would make great posts, if only I could find space for them. Except that I never do. Yet I don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to use these things, as they are at least mildly entertaining if not actually informative. Thus I give you… a story about my hi-fi.

Seriously.

I have a hi-fi that’s probably older than some of my readers. I was a teenager when I bought it, and in the tradition of “it works, why change it?” I still have it now I’m in my 30s.

It’s a pretty well-travelled hi-fi unit. It’s one of the first to have a CD player built in, back when they were rather like record player turnstiles and requires you to balance the CD precariously on a needle in order to play it.

This is also a miniature hi-fi, which makes a satisfyingly loud clunking noise when the tape turns over (it does this automatically – back when this was a big deal) and has a radio built in.

I made an attempt to replace it once, and found myself in one of those shops for people who obsess over sound quality that they could hardly possibly hear. I was given a CD player, a set of wires and some speakers I couldn’t use. Eventually, they were given to my brother.

So the hi-fi stays.

Over the last couple of years, it’s begun to develop issues. Pressing a button on the front is a lottery. Press the “power” button and you might 1. turn up the volume several notches, 2. change the channel to Radio 3, or 3. switch the hi-fi off. Most of the buttons now share functionality, if at all.

Occasionally, I mention this in the hearing of people who Like Electrical Things, or are the kind of people who keep soldering irons in their kitchen drawer. The kind of people who forget that not everybody knows everything there is to know about electronics. Or soldering irons.

I happened to mention my hi-fi having some very confusing ideas about what its buttons should do to one of these individuals when out at some kind of meeting*.

“Oh,” he said. “That’s easy. It’s probably a problem on one of the boards… the [insert technical thing here] has [verb] together and that’s caused the problem. All you have to do is take out the board, get a soldering iron and…”

My eyes glazed over slightly. “I don’t think I own a soldering iron…” I began, before I realised that of course, this is one of those people who think they can fix everything. Fixing experts.

They’re the kind of people who, at the slightest hint of anything going wrong (electrical or not) holds up a hand and says, “Wait! I think it’s just a little concolite in the grudunzilator. I’ll just get my spanner…” And three hours later you don’t have a car, you have an interesting collection of items that once fitted together within one metal body.

“I’ll just get the white spirit,” says the fixing expert. He probably has a garage at home full of partially demolished TVs and disemboweled toasters.

So far, I have not allowed any of these within any distance of my hi-fi, since I’d rather it remained a hi-fi, rather than being summarily dismantled. I can handle the wild roulette wheel of excitement that is trying to turn the volume up or down, or even getting it on or off. It’s certainly better than having no hi-fi at all.

***

*For the life of me I can’t recall 1. How on earth two people such as myself and he came to be talking, 2. What the event was or 3. Why I mentioned my hi-fi and its buttons in the first place. But I’m not going to let that get in the way of the story, oh no.