Yes we need innovation but we need to mend the stuff we have already too

It was while buying my Christmas Tree at my local lawnmower repair shop that I was reminded again about maintenance.

Lawnmowers and Christmas Trees are not an incongruous combination. If you move in the world of two-stroke engines and rapidly rotating blades, eventually you are going to be mixing in Festive Conifer-related circles.

I was asking the lawnmower man about how business was and, while he lamented the level of local taxes he had to pay for an urban village which seems to get more than its fair share of municipal neglect, at least he was getting plenty of work from the giant lawnmower retailers.

You know the ones on the edges of motorways located in retail parks that are bigger than parishes. They sold loads of lawnmowers but hadn’t a clue how to fix them. So they sent all the angry customers who came in carrying jagged bits of lawnmower and strimmer to their friendly, brightly signed customer service area, to the lawnmower man in the small-terraced shop down the road from me.

The point is, maintenance just wasn’t one of their functions. All they wanted was to shift units, make sales and hit their targets. Maintenance wasn’t sexy.

And I think it should be. In the movies, the maintenance characters all have humdrum roles, pottering around with a spanner, investigating a leak before being the first victim of the alien. Or else they’re undercover, masking their true intentions with blue overalls and a torch in their belt.

Innovators, though, it’s a different story. They’re always writing on glass walls or sitting in a swivel chair wearing shoes with no socks and a baseball cap backwards, to demonstrate their lack of orthodoxy. Their beautiful minds wrestling amazing discoveries out of nowhere, changing the world, one montage at a time.

Meanwhile in the background the Maintenance Types say it can’t be done. “You’ll blow the place sky high. Hero Character.” He laughs at their old-way thinking. We sneer at them with their Health and Safety certs.

Well I’ve had enough of innovation worship. Yes we need innovation but we need to mend the stuff we have already too. On a finite planet it’s a necessity.

Because we can’t keep going on the way we’re going. Consuming new things as the only philosophy. Like, I don’t want to undermine or dare question Apple’s near trillion-dollar valuation, but have you ever stopped to think about whether you actually need the newest iPhone. What do you need it FOR? Does it make toast for you?

The launch of the Nokia 3310 phone shows in a tiny way, maybe we’ve reached an event horizon of the Always Be Innovating mantra. It was launched at a super-glossy tech conference earlier this year. (I could have said very glossy but super is super-hot right now as an emphasiser).

They should have had a launch event full of everyone’s mother and father saying AT LAST, I JUST WANTED A PHONE THAT WOULD DO THE SIMPLE THINGS and wouldn’t break. Maybe a bit of retro is what is required.

I’m not talking about a load of steam-punk hipsters in coffee shops with personal gramophones and Newcomen engine-powered valve radios, winding the grandfather-clock on their wrists while playing chess with a mechanical Turk.

I’m just talking about a point where we realise that growth and new stuff isn’t the only way to exist and a bit of duct/duck tape, WD-40, chain oil is just as glamorous.

Of course we do that already. Maintenance keeps the world going around. But it doesn’t always get the headlines.

So I want a university named after a maintenance man, I want overalls to be the start up uniform. Silicon valley, in our lexicon joined by OilCan valley.

In a fractious world, let’s get On The Mend.