The whole concept of not knowing what you’ve got until it’s gone. Remember that song you used to hate hearing and now 20 some years later, you’d wish we’d be back to music like it because music today is too artificial and AI-powered? Remember nearly a lot of things you criticized and now have a soft spot for because everything now has gone to shit?
Yeah, that hits hard. What sucks is that sometimes, you don’t know for certain if you’re experiencing the best of things. But once it passes you, give it 1 - 5 years, you’ll know it.
God damn do I feel that.
I recently replaced my dryer. It suddenly started making a really alarming banging noise.
I’m a DIY-minded guy, spent maybe an hour taking the damn thing apart.
And I found the issue- a bad drum roller. Theoretically an easy enough fix once you have the whole dryer apart like I did (which wasn’t really hard, just time-consuming)
I went online and searched out the part, and it was going to cost me almost $200 (granted I was going to replace all 4 rollers, if one went there’s a good chance the others weren’t far behind)
For a bit of plastic and rubber that looks a hell of a lot like a scooter wheel.
And while I was in there, there were a couple belts and pulleys and such that I also wanted to replace. Stuff that was bound to wear out eventually, and the dryer was about 15 years old.
So all in I was looking at probably close to $4-500 in parts. Couple hundred more and I could just get a whole new dryer, which seemed like the smart choice because who knows what else might have been about to go- the motor, the heating element, any of the electronics
So that’s what I did. And I hated it. There was something I could have fixed, I wanted to fix it, but it just didn’t make financial sense to fix it.
This wasn’t a dryer from some oddball fly-by-night unheard of AliExpress brand, it’s an overall respectable company that makes a pretty reliable product. And this wasn’t a particularly specialized part, it was basically just a wheel. It should be the kind of thing that’s pretty much standardized, used by every company in countless models of different appliances, and available for cheap off the shelf at any hardware store. I should have been able to walk into Ace hardware and go buy something like a generic “3 inch roller wheel” for like $5, took it home, and slapped it onto my machine.
But instead it was some proprietary bullshit and I couldn’t find any readily available off-the-shelf part for a reasonable price that would have fit quite right.
They literally reinvented the wheel so that some years down the line I’d have to shell out money for a new dryer instead of fixing the one I had.
you could probably 3d print a replacement for fraction of the cost, just need to get the dimensions right
If they use standardized/universal parts and let you buy replacement parts for cheap, then how are they supposed to get you to buy a new dryer every ten years?
Think of the shareholders!