repair or rebuy?

Have you ever lamented the fact that "they don't build stuff like they used to"? I do. Recently I had a conversation with a local hunter, Harry, about how we'd both be willing to spend more for quality items if we had the opportunity. His example was a stainless steel cell phone rimmed with pleasing hardwood and a 5 year warranty. Repairable and worth repairing. A phone that would last over 10 years.

I bought a set of cordless phones about 3 years ago. About a year ago I needed to spend nearly what I paid for them on new batteries and for quite some time now one of the handsets suffers from random failure. In order to preserve my 'good' handset for my work, I've made it off limits(within reason) and have brought out my old phone that I bought used about 15 years ago. Sadly, we live in a cordless world and the old 'GE' plugin phone isn't quite keeping up to our fast paced lifestyle.

What to do?

Buy a new pair of cordless phones? No! I spent 17 dollars on those and then invested another 15 in batteries. I refuse to give in to the modern consumerist-obsolescence-complex.




I will fix this phone or destroy it completely in the process.



The innocent product of years of practiced and planned built-to-break engineering...

Of course, cheaply and quickly put together means quickly and freely taken apart...

It was noticed that sometimes pressing up against the headphone jack would either relieve the symptoms or send the phone into a static frenzy. I decided to surgically remove said part. Carefully, not to fry something else in the process, I used my rather punky soldering iron on it...

And excised the delinquent component...

Then, even more carefully, soldered a new wire to complete the circuit.

It means no headphones, but it also means one small victory against the system.