Tools that outlast their makers

My desk lamp was made in 1974. It has a steel arm, a cloth cord that I replaced once, and a switch that clicks like a small door closing. The company that made it stopped existing before I could read. I know this because I looked, one evening, for a manual, and found instead a forum thread of men who restore them.

The lamp has never been updated. It has also never asked me to accept new terms, which I now think of as a feature of the first rank.

What lasts

I have been collecting, without much system, the things in my life that outlast their makers. A kitchen knife I inherited. A hand drill. A paperback dictionary with a cracked spine, held together with a rubber band that I replace every few years. A very small program, written by one person, that converts text between character encodings, and which has done its job since before I owned a computer of my own.

When I lay them out, they have less in common than I expected. They are not all expensive. They are not all beautiful, and the drill is frankly ugly. But they share three or four habits, and I will try to say them without making it sound like a manifesto.

They do one job. The lamp lights a desk. The dictionary defines words. The encoding program converts encodings, and has never once suggested that I might also want a calendar.

They can be repaired by someone who is not the maker. When the lamp’s cord frayed, I bought a metre of replacement cloth cord and a plug, and followed a diagram drawn by a stranger. It took forty minutes and a lot of swearing, and the lamp is now arguably better than new.¹

1 The stranger’s diagram had one error, which I found out by getting a small shock. It was a lesson, but not one I would pay for.

They do not need anything from me to keep working. This is the quiet one. A tool that wants a login, a subscription or an internet connection has a heartbeat, and the heartbeat belongs to someone else. When that someone loses interest, the tool stops. I have owned a handful of those, and my memory of them is mostly of the last week, when they went strange.

The sad cases

I do not want to suggest that everything old is good. Plenty of old things are bad and were thrown away for decent reasons. A lot of what survives, survives by accident, in a drawer.

I also have a few tools that I love and expect to lose. One is a text editor I have used for eleven years, maintained by two volunteers. Both are tired, and one has said so in public. I have thought about what I will do when it stops, and the answer is that I will keep using the last version for as long as it runs, and I will feel a certain way about that.²

2 I have already downloaded a copy of the installer and put it in the folder with the 2009 files. This is either prudence or a hobby.

Which brings me to what I actually try to do about it. When I choose a new tool now, I ask a question that sounds grim and has served me well: what happens to my work if this disappears next year? If the answer is “nothing, the files are mine and any editor opens them,” I go ahead. If the answer is “I would have to export it, and I am not sure to what,” I wait.

A test you can run

You can try this on your own things. Pick one tool you rely on and imagine it is gone on Monday. Then write down, on paper, what you would lose. Not what would be inconvenient, since everything is. What you would lose.

The first time I did it with a notes app, the answer was six years of material and the shape of how I had organised it. That was a bad Monday, and it was imaginary. I moved the notes out that weekend.

A tool is worth what it leaves you when it goes. I do not think that is a clever sentence, but I have not found a more accurate one.

The lamp, again

I mentioned that the lamp has never been updated. That is not strictly true. I have updated it, in the sense that I rewired it and later added a different bulb, the sort that does not run hot. But those updates were mine, made when I chose, in my own kitchen.

That is the difference I keep returning to. The lamp changes when I change it. Most of what I own now changes when somebody else decides, and tells me afterwards, if at all. I do not think that is always wrong. I think it is worth knowing which kind of thing is on your desk.