Repair stories, #1

Iridium GO, won’t. Yoda saves us.

Ala Wai Small Boat Harbor, Honolulu, Hi, 22-Nov-2019 — For every story of breaking something, there is a story of fixing it. Most repairs on Caro Babbo are solitary endeavors, hopefully carried out on a dock with a reasonably priced chandlery near by. Many are carried out underway, and under pressure. All successful repairs are points of pride.

Many repairs lead through a chain of people and an overview, if not a transfer, of unknown skills and expertise.

Our Iridium GO is one of the few things on Caro Babbo that come as close to a single point of failure as we have aboard. It is the sole method we have of communicating to anyone outside of VHF radio range when we are away from cell phone service. Most importantly, we use it for weather forecasts and weather routing.

We make dependencies on these technologies.

Sometime on the San Diego-Hilo leg, we decided our Iridium GO should be moved from where we have always kept it, on the starboard cockpit dashboard, to somewhere else. At this moment, I’m not entirely sure where the somewhere else was, but I managed to snag the usb cable, plunging the unit to the cockpit sole, damaging the usb/power connector. The unit no longer charged very well… but it would run, if we were careful of the cable position, etcetera.

We have a Garmin handheld GPS that is the backup and backbone of parts of our navigation system. When it breaks, we send it to Garmin who sends us another for 80 bucks. I expected a similar service here. No soap, which shouldn’t be surprising. The iridium GO is the red-headed step child of Iridium.

I wanted a good tech who would re-solder the connector back to the board in a few minutes while I hung around or have it for me when I returned later in the day, which is what I got, but it is a story.

In Honolulu, I searched on line and found a few services that repaired a broken Iridium Go power port for about 50% of purchase price. Ouch! Interestingly, the copy on each vendor’s page was identical . There is a monopoly.

Online, I looked for local mobile phone repair places that could repair the power port. The first was Gadget Guyz. The review graph was a bi-modal curve. Individual reviews lauded Yoda. I put that one aside.

Near us was a place that claimed to do all repairs. It was in the mall.

Honolulu is Japanese tourist destination. Attractive Japanese twenty-somethings stroll and play. The women dress predominantly as if they walked of the set of That Girl! The men dress like young men worldwide in shorts with a loose shirt, but young Japanese men wear pressed clothing.

The Japanese women wear a remarkable amount of make up, which does not run. Wedding pictures on the beach, brides in white wedding gowns are beach features.

The mall is huge.

We have been slowly transitioning from the weeks alone, through small populations on Hawaiian islands, to a marina on the edge of a big city to the final immersion that took us into the belly of American consumer culture and out the other side to the Asian future.

Japanese food chains are at the entrance to mall. There are multiple small internal mini malls set like small town squares with long communal tables. We have never seen anything like this in the states, Europe or the parts of Asia we have traveled in. We assume they are Japanese.

The repair place was a kiosk that did not do this type of repair.

On to Yoda.

I called. The man answered “gadget guys.” I explained what I needed, he said to bring the device, he’d see what he could do. He’d be there until six except when he went out to lunch.

Jennifer and I walked across town on Queen Street, the home to automotive body shops, alarm companies and small breweries cum bars: not a tourist site.

At the address for Gadgets Guyz was a large sign for an alarm company. Taped to the door was a sheet of copy paper with the new address of the alarm company and hours for cell phone repair written on it.

We walked in.

The room was eight feet by ten feet with a ten foot ceiling, a work area, small boxes stacked to the ceiling. We were in the right place.

A thin man with fried blonde hair greeted us in the soft polite voice he had spoken to me on the phone. He asked how I was and I answered something positive and said we would learn.

The man answered something that to me sounded Alice in Wonderland. I watched his face, reparsed his words and realized that he had said something he was serious about, ending with the statement that he had two days left.

He didn’t look like he was about to die, nothing on the walls said the shop was closing, I took it to mean that he lived life as if he had two days left.

The conversation started a downward slide, as I tried mightily to recover from my somewhat flip, light-hearted response to what I thought was humor to something that was the key to living a virtuous life. I could feel myself drowning and with it my chance of getting the Iridium repaired.

A Venn diagram with no intersection, two separate circles on a blank page are Jennifer’s and my areas of expertise. It makes Jennifer the most wonderful companion to take to business meetings because she can teach us all about interesting topics that no one, save the classically- and European-educated Duncan Suss, can engage in.

Jennifer looked at the monitor and said, “Alan Watts. ” The conversion immediately jumped the tracks to Mr. Watts and I was saved.

The conversion continued for half an hour with interruptions for phone calls,”when well it be ready? Well, I have developed a proprietary technology. When you drop off the phone I transport you into the future 100 years, and then bring you back the day before you drop off the phone so that it is already repaired when you come to drop it off. “

There was a long silence on the other end before the voice said, “Okay, I’ll drop it off in about an hour.”

On the wall behind Yoda was the reason we were here, a certificate in micro soldering.

Yoda held up a very large vibrator with two vibrating pads and said, “Some vibrators are for masturbation. This one says, ” and he read us a notice written on the side of the device saying that this device was to be used on large body parts and to be kept away from hair and small body parts.

Yoda wondered why they just didn’t put an ad for masturbation vibrators on the device.

Individuals came and went, picking up and dropping off phones, some just came to say hello. Yoda called each by name and introduced Jennifer and me to each in turn.

Eventually, we started talking about the Iridium GO. I explained what it did and what was good and bad about it.

A sailboat owner who works with I Heart Radio came in and while the conversation became three or maybe four, or maybe even more ways, Yoda started to open the device.

He opened the battery compartment with a coin and then the four corner screws that hold the clam shell together. Because he loosened each one completely, the fourth bore all of the expansion pressure of the seal and was very difficult to remove.

He opened the case using a single-edge razor blade as a lever and then carefully peered into the unit.

He released a flat cable with a screw driver, explaining that the screw is a clamp, but many people pull the cable out destroying it.

The conversation had left Alan Watts and how to live and passed through Waikiki as the best place to see bikinis, real estate (from his mortgage payments, I suggested he was holding about $2.5mm in real estate, he corrected me saying 2.1, but commended me on my math), to his wife and his girl friend – two different people – to murals and how he and his girlfriend would love to take us on a walking tour of Honolulu’s murals.

I wondered, is this the pace of work here in Honolulu? How could he afford to live? As the topics became less engaging I watched Yoda replace batteries and screens at roughly $50 a pop and guessed that he was knocking down about $200/hr.

He was generous with his time, exceedingly honest with his customers; we found ourselves growing fond of him.

Eventually, we said we had errands to run. Yoda said we could stay in the shop if we liked; it would be two hours before he’d finish the repair. We said we had things to do and would pick up lunch for him.

We returned about 2-1/2 hours later with gyros from Leo’s Taverna. We ate them together.

As we finished lunch, an Asian-American man came in, was greeted by Yoda as Richard and introduced to us. Over the course of the next hour we got to know and became friends with Richard Tom, retired teacher and guidance counselor from Long Island NY, where I grew up.

Richard is 18- years older than me, knew my high school and some of its faculty. Richard kibbitzed, dropping Yiddish and Italian phrases, making me feel like I was back home.

Yoda complained about how he was being left out. Then told us how much admiration and fondness he had for Richard demonstrated by letting Richard lead the conversation in Yoda’ s shop.

The conversion grew as customers as arrived and shrank as they left. Yoda started work on the Iridium GO. He joined the conversation while scrubbing the board inside the device with a tooth brush and then sat looking through his microscope in front of his soldering diploma with his back to us.

Jousting with and listening to Richard made time pass. New York sensibilities made me feel at home. Soon Yoda showed me, under the microscope, the newly installed power port. The workmanship was impeccable.

Yoda asked whether the old charred blackened powerport got hot because one of the pins had bent and shorted out? I hadn’t noticed.

I paid Yoda $80 for the repair, including parts and tax. This is about 12% of the device’s price.

While saying good bye, Yoda told me to embrace heart-to-heart to show sincerity. Jennifer asked where he learnt this. He answered he made it up.

Richard told us about fire works on the beach next to us and we invited Yoda to join us. I can’t for the life of me figure out why we didn’t ask Richard as well.

We bought beer on the way home to share with Yoda and perhaps his new girlfriend. As it got dark, we were received a text from Yoda saying he probably wouldn’t make it because he was working with a customer.

So far we haven’t acted on the promise to see Yoda again. A tour with him of the murals in Honolulu would be a very nice thing to do. We’d like to meet this wonderful woman with whom he is currently in love. He showed us a picture of her, which frankly startled Jennifer and I, it was a picture of a very lovely, well proportioned 19-year old wearing a very small bathing suit. The picture was 32-years old.