Colm O'Regan: Let's hear it for the fixers - and beat forced obsolescence

Comedian and Irish Examiner columnist Colm O'Regan, pictured in Cork. Actual, proper photography by Denis Minihane.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Let’s hear it for the menders. The fixers. 

The people with nifty hands and needles and small screwdrivers who take a look at your problem and say “Yeah I think we can do something with that”.

They don’t get awards for innovation but every day they have to come up with some way to bring new life into a thing we have abused and mistreated— our stuff.

Let’s hear it for the tailor-dressmaker who brought three renegade jeans of mine back from the brink of arselessness.

One pair so ripped I was vaguely fashionable for about 10 minutes. But she made them even more fashionable by putting very obvious patches on the inside.

Get this! Patches on jeans are in now. The most embarrassing of all things to have on a jean one time. But people are buying them new! I got mine through neglect and knowing a tailor.

Let’s hear it for the cobblers, whichever of them are still left, standing in a sea of shoes, slightly high on glue, dealing with falling footfall of failing footfallers.

But absolutely delighted when you come in and are willing to give a pair of shoes one last go.

They even mended one of our child’s runners. Mending children’s shoes. Are we mad?! That’s like shouting at the sea, isn’t it? Pointless. Won’t they have grown out of them? 

But children don’t actually grow out of shoes overnight. It takes at least a week. And sometimes longer. 

And when there’s a pair of shoes they like, I just want to give them any amount of extra time. Just to put off the experience of shoe shopping.

Let’s hear it for the gadget fixers. In a world awash with the hazardous waste of discarded memory of our memories, these people chip away at the expansion of the waste pile, once you leave them to your own devices. 

It’s now the longest I’ve had a phone in my life. And like I’m sure what happens to a lot of men my age, it’s part of my identity.

Colm of the Ten-Year Jeans is also Colm of the Five-Year Phone. But feck it, if you can’t take joy in Stuff Lasting in middle age, when can you take joy in it? (Old age, obviously).

It’s not even one of those Nokia ones from 2000, which will survive the apocalypse. It’s a fragile smartphone. But still, five years is kind of good now for phones.

Built-in obsolescence seems thwarted firstly by them foolishly putting in an okay battery first day. But also the combined efforts of some highly skilled menders, in brightly-lit half-vape-half-phone shops in the inner city.

The most recent fixing was after a fall. The phone is now old enough so I can describe it as “having a fall”.

It took the man two hours to fix it. It had accumulated all the dust of everywhere I’d ever been in my life. If forensics had a look at the much that came out of it, I could probably be placed inadvertently at three crime scenes.

The cost was in the “shur you could get a new one for that” but I just don’t want a new one. What do I need a higher-res camera for? 

I won’t be putting anxious photos of thinning hair up on billboards. Seriously, why do we all need such good cameras?

We still need to hire actual proper photographers, anyway, who know about composition and lighting to get one shot of us that is better than the three hundred we took in a mirror with a stained toilet bowl peeping in the background.

So as this year turns its corner, in with the old, and let someone else get the new.