When I was a wee lad of 12, we graduated directly from the sixth grade straight into the high school. They called 7th and 8th grade “junior high school”, but we were in the same building, using mostly the same classrooms and facilities.
Back then (in the late 1970s), seventh-grade girls took “Home Economics”, where they learned how to cook, clean, sew and all sorts of late 19th century bullshit that seemed a tragic anachronism during the E.R.A. era, even to this clueless, unwoke adolescent. The boys took shop class, or as it was known in my school, “Industrial Arts,” where we learned to use bandsaws and drill presses that our future wives would never let us buy and, anyway, I was going to be Rick Wakeman’s replacement on keyboards in the band “Yes” so why did I need to know how to use a box wrench???
On my first day of class in 7th grade, I headed down to the Industrial Arts classroom, which was in the bowels of the school, to embark on what would end up being a semester-long colossal waste of time. The teacher, Mr. Kozak, informed us that we would be spending the semester taking apart our own little gas-powered lawnmower engines, fixing whatever might be wrong, and then reassembling it into a working engine.
It took me exactly two class periods to get mine apart and then the remainder of the semester to NEVER get it even close to reassembled, let alone actually working. Yes, there were kids who got their engines back together and working perfectly. I am sure they are now running GM or working in the pit crew of the Ferrari F1 Racing Team. Or they’re in jail. Hard to say. I, however, was more academically inclined toward shooting my mouth off and getting sent to detention. So, shop class was a bust.
It is with this sad memory in mind that I hope to seek out Mr. Kozak and tell him that his efforts on my behalf were not entirely in vain. It only took 45 years, but I have expunged my dreary, sad record of failure in shop class, and covered myself in compu-mechanical glory.
Here’s how: Every Sunday night, I shut down my computer. On Monday of this week, I went to fire it up and was presented with the black screen, with the MS-DOS characters telling me that my 12-year-old Lenovo laptop had a “Fan Error.” The sequence went something like this:
> Press power button
> Lenovo logo appears for three seconds
> White text on black screen “Fan Error”
> Shut down
Oh. Fuck.
I had some actual, real work to do, as opposed to my usual daily diet of Reddit scrolling for evidence of the end of the world.
So, I searched “Lenovo laptop fan error” on my iPad and found that this is a known thing.
The choices are pretty grim. I could take it to a local repair shop, which might get to it in the next few days and maybe or maybe not could fix it. Or I could buy a new computer and then attempt to restore my full Windows 10 backup (yes, I do full backups every night except Sunday) from a 12-year-old machine to a new Windows 11 machine. Big question mark there.
Or, I could try to buy a used version of my laptop on eBay and just put my hard drive into the replacement machine. (Easy fix, should work, but could take more than a week to get one from eBay.)
Or – OR – I could channel my inner Mr. Kozak and try to fix it myself.
I go onto Amazon (because… Amazon) and find the exact replacement fan for my exact computer for $20.
It arrives the next day. I find a video on YouTube (because… YouTube) of some guy with a Slavic accent taking apart my exact laptop to repair the fan.
I proceed to rip my trusty but ailing laptop down to the motherboard, screws and wire connectors so that I can get to the fan. I remove it, put in the new one, put it all back together (or so I thought) and try to start it up.
“Fan Error.”
FUUUUCCCKKKK. It’s November of 7th grade all over again.
I go BACK onto my iPad and start looking at other fixes, including messing with the system BIOS and sacrificing my dog to some god of something. (He’s a shelter rescue dog and a team player, so I could have talked him into it with a Milk Bone and an ear scratch.)
As I am researching other fixes, the thought occurs to me: “Hey, dummy: You INSTALLED the new fan, but did you bother to connect it to the power connector on the motherboard?”
To which I replied: “Oh, like YOU’RE so f-ing smart.”
But he (that is, I) had a point. So, I take the whole thing apart again, down to the bones, and there it is: the fan power wire dangling blissfully free from the motherboard without a care in the world.
I connect it, reassemble and “voila!” The system works like it is 2010. And, I have two screws left over which I am told is good for extra credit bonus points on my final exam.
Today’s lesson for you youngsters who are reading this: What you learn today in school could pay dividends decades from now so PAY ATTENTION!!! Unless you are taking Home Economics, in which case they now make steam-powered butter churns, so you don’t have to do it by hand.