Recently, my glasses made of titanium gave up the ghost. One of the temples1 broke off. My initial thought was, no problem, I am not especially picky about things, any replacement will do.
Oh, man. At 48, I am a person of the past, and my attempt to get the glasses fixed turned into an odyssey full of misunderstanding. During my life, we have become a rich nation, and that comes with some downsides.
I visited four different optician shops, but for the sake of brevity, I will describe the last, most interesting visit.
“It is broken,” said the young, spotlessly dressed man behind the counter. He might have been 19. His colleague, a blonde woman of the same age, looked but said nothing. She never said anything during those fifteen minutes that I spent in the shop.
“I know,” I confirmed the obvious. “It is broken. Can we fix this somehow? You know, a new temple?”
“It is broken,” repeated the young man. “You need new glasses.”
He didn’t look like someone who had a lot of experience fixing glasses or diagnosing unfixable issues, so I could not believe that this was a professional assessment of the actual technical complexity of the problem.
“I know that it is broken, and I would like to ask if you have spare parts, or perhaps can forward this to a workshop? I’d like to avoid spending EUR 500 for new glasses, thank you.”
The young man just stared. It didn’t look as if he was angry. The request just did not compute for him. “Fix my glasses” was something like “fix the tissue I just blew my nose into”, a thing that simply was not done.
“Workshop? What workshop?” he replied and then simply gave up. “Please wait for the manager, she is busy right now.” She indeed was, talking to a pair of customers who had arrived before me. I was ushered towards a table with a seat. I must admit that back in my day, opticians would not have tables with seats for their customers. We have become a rich nation and that was one of the upsides.
The manager finished talking to the previous customers and came to my table. She was about 35, so exactly between me and the youngsters at the counter. The difference from the youngsters showed: she fully understood the idea of fixing broken glasses and didn’t consider it otherworldly. The difference from me showed as well, because she was uncomfortable with using some generic spare part from god-knows-where. I spent a few minutes persuading her that we would not cause a new Chernobyl by using a vendor-unapproved temple or two on my old glasses.
Finally, she let out a sigh. “OK, so the dimensions are X and Y, and if you find spare temples for those dimensions on the Internet, come with them and we will screw them on for you for free. It must indeed be done in a workshop, no one can handle the screws here.”
“Thank you,” I replied. “I will ask Claude for details and come back with the spares.”
This is an interesting development. Growing wealthy comes with some downsides, and one of those downsides is the slow but inexorable loss of the ability and also will to fix broken things. As late as 2000, a standard optician shop in Czechia would have a tiny workshop attached and various small fixes would have been done on demand. Cheap spare temples would have been in stock. A generation later, the shops have transformed into mere fronts where the personnel are no longer capable of doing anything with their own hands.
This willingness to fix things, now disappearing, was a capability born of necessity, because the Communist consumer market was terrible and sheer improvisation was the only way to keep things going. The regime worshipped heavy industry and everything else was left for the population to solve - somehow. And thus, the people became really proficient at fixing things or jury-rigging improvised equipment out of almost anything that was there. The Czech inventor of the soft contact lenses, Prof. Wichterle, developed them using his own children’s toy kit, Merkur, combined with a bicycle dynamo, because normal lab equipment just was not available. Not everyone was Wichterle, but almost everyone did things like that, because the alternative was for the entire country to stop in its tracks for the lack of maintenance.
This, by the way, is also why Ukraine is still holding out against Russia. The forty- and fifty-somethings there grew up under late-stage Communism of the Soviet Union, which was, in all respects, even worse and poorer than late-stage Communism in Czechoslovakia. Improvisation and getting things done under impossible conditions were part of their basic life skills, and this is exactly how you build a world-class drone army in a country with the GDP of Nebraska.
Drones lend themselves to improvisation extremely well. They are small, not too complex, can be built from a heap of parts, can have their firmware hacked and reprogrammed, mistakes aren’t too expensive - an ideal platform for handy and active technicians to nerd out, if you have the will and experience to to do this.
I cannot imagine this happening in an orderly, wealthy, hierarchical country that is used to fixed procedures. The idea that everything gets sent to the Proper Place Where It Belongs and tickets are duly created in Jira is just too rooted there. It probably works reasonably well in peacetime, although at some extra financial cost. But once the conditions stop being so peaceful… it will be the time to pick some old Eastern brains, my friends. They still know something that the rest of the developed world has already forgotten.
The extent of use of AI in this article: 14 grammatical errors fixed. No editing.