Respect

So as written in prior entries, my phone had been messed up for a while. I eventually decided that it probably was a broken digitizer, which the internet had been suggesting since my very first search but which I had been trying to find my way around endlessly. I tried frying it with a hair dryer twice. Used a lot of electricity, but still no luck.

First I asked the foreign liaison here to help me find a place to fix it, and she called around a little bit while I was in the office and found the official Motorola repair store in town. When I went there one day, they told me it would be $100 to fix it. I mean, I could almost buy a new phone for that much money. No, I could buy a new phone for that much money. I decided to not agree to the price on the spot, walked away, and figured I'd give it one last go on my own before agreeing to such a ridiculous price.

I ended up finding a post online that was rather recent and had suggestions for cell phone repairs in Nanjing, so I tried the number listed there. It said that he always had one English speaker on staff, but I discovered immediately upon calling that they did not. I asked the class master for my Canadian kids to call for me, and I felt bad because she was watching a TV show during her lunch break when I called. She said that they could out how much it would cost and that they would call back.

I got wrangled into doing some office clean up on the way out of her office, but he called back shortly after. I had already forgotten how to say "Wait a minute" in Chinese, which Sarah had just told me, so I just had to keep saying "Okay" or "Ni hao" or "Hao de" or something like that while running to Sarah's office. They said they could do it for 200RMB, which is roughly $30, which is a way better deal. So I said I'd go there. I got the address and went.

The place where I went to get it fixed was really quite crazy. It's this enormous underground market (literally underground, you have to take a 10m subway down to get to it) that's filled to the brim with all types of cell phone vendors. And when I say filled to the brim, I mean very definitely more than 100 shops, possibly more than 200, all just in one big room, more or less. It took me a few minutes to even find the store I was looking for, #011.

The store that we had called ended up not having the part themselves, so they took me to another store that did. It was pretty crazy; they just had bucket after bucket of cell phone screen and digitizer replacement sorted by brand and make, literally hundreds of them, some from companies I didn't even know existed. I had printed out a paper describing my problem, and with the help of that and a woman who spoke a little bit of English, we were able to get things under way.

The real muscle of the entire operation at this store, though, appeared to be this one guy, quite tall, strangely muscular considering his job, with a markedly flatter face than most Chinese people, wearing an athletic shirt with a shiny black main portion and yellow mesh sides, sitting straight up at a work bench fixing every phone that came his way, testing the ones he fixed, and often working on more than one at a time. He had a bunch of drills, dryers, coolers, soldering irons, and everything else you'd need to fix a phone right in front of him, which made me feel a bit relieved with the whole operation.

Beyond that, it was clear that this guy had serious skill. When he got a phone in his hand, it always looked like he knew exactly what to do with it. It didn't even look like he'd just memorized all the different styles of phones, which was totally impossible, but more like he understood the motifs behind phone design and how to get to every part of each one. For instance, in my phone you have to peel up half of the sticker underneath the battery to get to the screws that hold the casing together. I don't think my phone is sold in China, but he still knew exactly where to look. And he swapped back and forth between working on mine and three or four other phones, never seeming to lose track of where he was.

I did notice that at the very end, he put my phone all the way back together and turned it on. Then he looked to the case where he'd been keeping all of its parts, and noticed that the speaker was still in there. He had to pry it back open quickly and click it back into place. He then tested it for a few minutes, declared it good, and handed it back to me.

I have so little skill with my hands, but I have so much respect for people that do. I don't care if it's sewing, drawing, painting, fixing cars, electronics, phones, whatever. I can't do any of it, and it seems like it's some kind of magic to me. It took about an hour for him to fix my phone and the other ones he was working on, but it was mesmerizing to just sit there and watch him pound through them. I found myself wishing that I could do something like that. I realize that I probably never will, that it's not even 1/100th worth the investment unless I make some kind of job of it, but I thought the whole time, damn, I wish I could do anything like this.

Peace out.