Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [44]
Some mechanics, like Pirsig’s idiot, seem to have not enough concern for the motorcycle. I have suggested this moral failure tends to coincide with the cognitive failure of getting anchored in snap diagnostic judgments, and not being sufficiently attentive to the bike. Further, that the challenge for such a mechanic is to get outside his own head. I would now like to explore a different problem (my own), that of being obsessive about a motorcycle, and consider how this, too, can be a matter of selfishness. Sometimes I drive the bill up because I’m servicing my own compulsion. There is often a strain between my concern for the bike and my fiduciary responsibility to the owner. The economic exchange between us introduces another layer to the work, then, a metacognition where the factual question of what the bike needs gets complicated by the existence of multiple perspectives.
Of Madness, a Magna, and Metaphysics
I once got a call from a guy with a 1983 Honda Magna V45. This is kind of an uninspiring bike, to my taste. Further, the thing had been sitting for two years. Such calls are fairly common, if you’re known as someone willing to deal with old bikes, especially someone willing to pick them up. Inevitably, these conversations include an assertion that “it ran fine when I parked it.” It took me a few years, and lots of head scratching over mechanical situations that, no matter how I tried, could not be attributed to sitting, to realize the basic implausibility of such recollections. If it had run fine then, it wouldn’t have been sitting for the last two years.
But it was winter, and business was slow. Being of two minds about this job, I tried my best at the outset to scare the owner: “Assuming it’s got all the usual problems from sitting, you’re looking at a thousand dollars to get it back on the road. The carbs will need to be gone through, it’ll need new fork seals, new battery, new tires, probably new hydraulic lines, and who knows what else, so a thousand is about the minimum.” This bike had one of the early Honda V4 engines, and they had problems with excessive wear in the valve train. “Have you kept the valves adjusted?” He had no recollection of ever having the valves adjusted. “You might want to just get rid of it.”
This speech was a preemptive assault to adjust the expectations of the owner. A slap in the face, speeches like this are intended to highlight the irrational character of an owner’s attachment to his decrepit old motorcycle. The more experience I have acquired, the more ruthless I have become in making such speeches. But here I am caught in a contradiction, since my entire business model is based on precisely such irrational attachment. If the Magna owner did the sensible thing, I would have nothing to do.
It was some dim awareness of this fact that led me to imitate Fred. He would answer his phone with a high-pitched “Service!” I loved the generality of that greeting, and started doing the same at my shop. What is being serviced, exactly? Among other things, the psyches of people with irrational attachments to old motorcycles. Frank talk, even a little abuse, is part of the repertoire of every therapist. A guy wanders into my shop expecting some cozy bonding over the aesthetic pleasures of “vintage” motorcycles, and instead finds himself berated like a hapless neurotic caught onstage with Dr. Phil. Peel away the hopeful interpretations, and “vintage” stands revealed as simply “old.”
The more breathing room I can get from the owner—the more I raise his expectations for the bill—the more discretion I have in dealing with the bike itself. When you are fixing bikes that are not