Notes from Maine - 2026/03/29
We had a super quiet time this past week. March keeps on marching out there. One day is bright and warm. The next day the ground is frozen again. Albert likes the frozen days. He gets to chase the frisbee a lot longer when he’s not getting covered in mud. It’s also nice to be able to drive the truck around to the barn so I can unload supplies.
The warm days are far more charming though. Soon we’ll be opening the windows and listening to the songs of the Spring Peepers (little frogs that live out back in the marsh and sing all night). The horses have already turned up their noses at the hay once or twice. There’s no good grass to graze on, but that doesn’t stop them from wandering around to see for themselves.
Wednesday I went down and worked at my friend’s arcade. They have dozens of machines on the floor and all the simple problems are taken care of quickly in order to keep the machines in service. When I arrive, I’m pointed towards the back room where the real trouble lies. Those machines have issues that are catastrophic or so unusual that nobody bothered to even hazard a guess at how to fix them. I enjoy working on problems I haven’t seen before and it’s also fun to work on repairs with other people who speak the same language. When I’m fixing pinball machines here at the house, I’m typically working by myself.
I assisted a person who I’ve met a couple of times. He was brought in to take a stab at a machine that had been sidelined for more than a year. He was the fourth qualified technician to take a run at getting the thing back up and running. A few hours later, we made a ton of progress, but we’d still fixed nothing. It was a great time.
When I was a kid, I loved to take broken things apart and try to see what was wrong with them. At that time I didn’t have any decent tools for electronics, and absolutely no access to replacement parts. Most things I investigated left my hands just as broken as when I started. It’s a different story now. If I don’t have the part in one of my bins, we can jump online and have the part waiting the next time I visit. Fixing a machine so that it’s working 100% is great, but the real thrill comes when you find an old repair that has broken once again. You see the ineptitude of the previous technician and curse under your breath as you remove their “hacks” to get back to the root problem. Then, with an overwhelming sense of superiority, you fix it “right,” take a step back, and nod at your fine work. Down the road, nobody will ever know the horrible condition you found the device in. They might spot your repair, but they won’t know how much electrical tape and stupidity you had to remove before you set things straight.
Some technicians mark their repairs with a tag or a bit of gold paint on the parts they’ve replaced. I guess it might be helpful down the road, but it strikes me as simple hubris. Then again, maybe I don’t mark things because I’m afraid to sign my work. I’m timid about being judged. Years ago, I was drawn to pinball because I enjoyed playing the games. I never would have guessed that a time would come when I enjoyed repairing them more than playing. You get to witness a complexity and level of design that’s not so common anymore. Back in the 1970s and 80s these things were minting money and had to be unique, pretty, novel, complicated, and reliable. Those qualities aren’t embraced all too often now—the evolution of novelties has selected for cheap, shiny, and disposable.
There’s an apocryphal story about Henry Ford and the longevity of car parts. Supposedly, he sent a team of engineers to a junkyard in order to find out which car parts had failed. They came back to report their results, expecting that the boss would assign them to improve the parts that had failed the most. Instead, Ford decreased the manufacturing specifications for parts that were still in good working condition. The idea was frugality: if the car has a working life of X years, why would you want to build any of the parts to survive longer?
The machines I’m working on were designed for an 18- to 24-month cycle. By then, new technology and gadgets would lure the players to the latest releases. It’s miraculous that these things are still working fifty years later. I think it’s difficult to build a machine that can survive 20,000 plays a year and not accidentally build it to last forever. Of course it helps that we still have parts available. I’m glad there wasn’t a Henry Ford of the pinball industry. Well, maybe there was, but apparently nobody listened to them.
