Daily Dose of English 66
Repair
Daily Dose of English 66
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben, and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about repair, repairing things. And I hope that my audio isn't weird today because I was trying to solve a different audio problem which for some reason changed my settings here for my recording. So I hope that I don't sound terrible. We'll see how this goes but I don't want to mess with it anymore. So today we're going to talk about repair, like I said, and repair is where you fix things. You get something working again. It goes from broken to not broken, generally. And I think repair is really important in a lot of ways. And I want to talk a little bit about why that is, what I think is important to repair, and maybe some of my own experience about it. So, repair is important really for many reasons, but one of the most important reasons is that it is better for people economically, and also it's better for things in terms of waste. It's better for the planet, and there's a lot of reasons things are better. and because it allows you to have more expensive products that last for longer. I don't know why I stopped my list and then restarted it again, but yeah, those are the three main reasons that I think repair is important. One, it reduces waste. Two, it, wait, oh yeah, two, it's better for your wallet, it's cheaper. And then three, it means you get to buy better products and use them for longer without feeling like that you're making a bad decision because it's just gonna break or whatever. So repair is literally where you fix something, or somebody fixes something, I think it's important to say, and you end up with a thing that works better at the end, obviously. I'm having a little bit of trouble, I guess, explaining that, even though it's sort of my job is to explain concepts. But let's give an example, actually. The reason I'm talking about this is because today, I had to fix my glasses. because they broke. And I really like wearing my glasses because it helps me to see. And what happens is the joint, the part where it connects, I guess the sort of stick, connects to the glasses itself, broke. And that means that I couldn't put the glasses on my face, which is where they're supposed to be. And so I was like, OK, well, this is terrible. I now don't have glasses, but I really want to wear glasses so I can see better. And so I decided to go see what I could do about it. And I was really worried that it would be expensive and I would have to wait a long time, whatever. But I walked down to a close glasses shop business, and I was like, I have a problem. These are broken. And the guy was like, oh yeah, no problem. And he grabbed them, and he took out a piece, and he put in another piece, and then put on a different stick, whatever they're called, the thing that goes over my ear. And so now they work again. They look a little funny because they're using different parts, but they work again. I can see and now I can figure out what to do if I want to get new glasses or whatever. And it was a couple bucks. It wasn't very expensive, which is great because getting a new pair of glasses is a couple hundred dollars and it takes a couple days. But I was able to get these fixed for just like it was three dollars. That's so much better in a lot of ways. And I'm really grateful that I was able to get my glasses fixed so easily and quickly. I think it took me 20 minutes and that was with chatting with him and talking about other options and so I'm very grateful that I was able to fix and repair my glasses. However, and now this is where we get into a different side of things, that isn't always an option. specifically when we're talking typically, okay, I can't use words like that, specifically when we're talking about computers and devices like that, so phones, laptops, computers, cameras, and things like that, for a couple of specific reasons. And there's this whole thing in the tech space called right to repair. The right to repair is where people that are fighting for the right, which is like a thing that you're allowed, that you're given, in the case of a right, it's something that's typically, we require it as people, right? So like everybody has the right to X, Y, Z. And so in this case, a lot of people, myself included, think that we have the right to repair stuff that we purchase, right? If I buy a phone, I should be allowed to fix it or to bring it somewhere to be fixed. However, Big companies don't want you to be able to do this. They want you to buy a new thing. And so they make it intentionally difficult or often illegal to repair your products, the things that you buy. And they say, okay, you can't do that. And then people go, why? It's my iPhone. I bought the iPhone from you. And they go, well, you can't, which is ridiculous. And so there's a lot of people that fight against that and say, no, we should have the right to repair things. And the important thing here is that you don't necessarily have to repair your own phone. The idea is that you can go somewhere and get your phone repaired for you by somebody else who knows what they're doing, but that person doesn't necessarily work for the phone company. They are able to buy the parts, they're able to learn on their own, and they're able to make their own business, essentially repairing things at a more fair price. If you've ever broken the glass on your phone, so the screen, and you've gone to one of those places that puts different glass on, it's that same idea. However, nowadays it's getting harder and harder to do that and do what's like a real screen repair. In the case of iPhones specifically, Apple has made it very, very difficult to get legitimate, real iPhone screens and the materials to replace the things. And so it's getting harder and more expensive to replace because they're choosing to do that. Not because it needs to be, but because it's an active choice that Apple is making. which is stupid, in my opinion. Everybody should be able to repair things that they buy. It's very important for, like I said, reducing the waste, right? Because if you just throw out your phone because the screen broke, you should just be able to fix the screen and keep using it because everything else works fine. It also means that you don't have to worry about buying better or more expensive stuff because it's gonna last longer because you're able to repair it, right? If you buy, I don't know, I mean, a phone, why not? If you buy an iPhone and you go, okay, this phone is really expensive. I spent over a thousand US dollars on this phone. But if I drop it, does that mean I have to pay another thousand dollars? That's too much. That's a lot of risk. Maybe I'll just buy this cheaper, worse phone that I don't even really want because I need a phone, but I'm afraid it's going to break. Not to say that Apple actually have the best phones, I don't think that's true. Partly because of this, because of the ridiculousness and difficulty of repairing and customization, but that's a whole different conversation. And that's why I recommend that people think about this when they buy things. I choose to build my own, or I built my own PC, so my own computer, because I'm able to upgrade things. If something breaks, I can get a new one, but only one piece rather than everything. I also decided to get for my, I have a laptop, which is a framework laptop, which is a company that is making repairable devices. And that's their sort of entire thing about their business is that their devices are repairable. I can open up my laptop computer in 30 seconds and see inside and I can replace things, I can move things around, and it's one, very easy, but two, it's possible, right? Maybe you don't wanna have to open your own computer and worry about that, but with a framework laptop, you could just take it to somebody else and they can get the new part for you and put it in in a couple of minutes. But if your MacBook breaks, then you can't really get it repaired unless you go to a very specialized store that has a bunch of special tools and things because it is made to be difficult to repair. And so I just wanted to talk a little bit about the right to repair and repair in general because I think it's something very, very important in our world in 2024. And I'm very glad that I was able to repair my glasses so easily because otherwise it would have been a huge pain and I would have just been super stressed out and my life would have been made a little bit worse. And so I'm glad that I was able to get my glasses repaired. And I hope that in the future we'll be able to get really anything repaired because that's the way to keep things around and to, I guess, just generally, uh, make products and things better for everybody. But anyways, that's all that I have for this episode today. I hope that you enjoyed. I enjoyed making it, even though I talked a little bit strange about some things, but anyways, I'll see you again tomorrow. Bye. Oh my God.
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