I heart you, desk fan
Mark Morford at SFGate has an interesting column about the soulfulness of gadgets. Perhaps, he says, it's worth our time to every so often appreciate the help that these things give us. Their sacrifices, even. Does your phone have a soul? Most of your major tax-exempt religions would say no, but it's certainly spent a lot of time listening to you. Probably more than your mother, even. (Perhaps exactly as much as the NSA, but that's a post for another blog.)
Morford writes,
I have, on my desk right now, a Salton mug warmer. I paid, I believe, about $9.95 for it, back in 1997. It has performed perfectly, every single day, for nearly nine years. It has successfully kept warm an estimated 2,500 mugs of coffee. It has been through three girlfriends and five roommates and over a million words. It has never failed me, not even once.
When it finally breaks down, when the little Chinese-made heating element fries itself out and I have to toss it and get a new one, I shall probably hold it in my hands and stare at it and offer it some thanks, let those memories swim through. Maybe I'll speak to it. Give it a kiss. And then move on.
I know, it's ridiculous. I know, it's not very macho. I know, how utterly embarrassing. Whatever.
That struck a chord with me, because I routinely give the same kind of reverence to my little desk fan. It's a "Cool Breeze" model, and I bought it at a drugstore about 2 years ago for maybe $15. I'd be willing to bet that it's spent more time on than off, thanks to my tendency to forget to turn it off before going home. And it's never given me any trouble that a squirt of WD-40 couldn't fix.
What's so miraculous about that? Let's say that it's averaged 12 hours a day for the last two years. That's 8760 hours of use. A reasonable blade speed for a desk fan looks to be about 1000 rpm, so that's...
525,600,000 rotations. 525 million. For $15 and not a thought more.
Imagine doing something, anything, 525 million times. Modern manufacturing is pretty amazing, isn't it?