A service call on a sunny Saturday morning during the fall of 2020. Yes, you got it, right smack amidst a freakin' worldwide pandemic. Yet, people still wanted to play pinball. It was like they were just flippin' the bird to the looming second wave. Pinball repair had become a social service of sorts allowing those who were truly flipping out a chance to forget their woes for a while.

We were at the beginning of another decade, and what got us here was beginning to resemble the 20's of the last century. Our excesses, our greed and an exaggerated sense of self importance had become increasingly obscene, and predictably, change was waiting to come down on us like a huge party pooper. Now and then it is good to remember what triggered changed in the world last time around. And so now we were due for another "adjustment", this time in the form of a virus accompanied by some dangerous sociopaths acting as heads of state. As for the good people who wanted a better world, well, they first would have to get rid of this "bug" and those political power hungry parasites before rebuilding could begin.

So under these circumstances, it's ironic that I was ready to take on the Six Million Dollar Man. According to the owner of this 6 player Bally pinball machine, it was "sluggish" and had been that way since he acquired it a decade ago. I asked for clarification on what "sluggish" meant, but got no more adjectives from this man who was short on words. On site, I observed that the six million dollar man played as if it were in slow motion, like the action sequences of the show. This intrigued me so I decided to take on the job. I remembered those slow motion segments of Lee Marvin jumping 20 feet in the air and tackling a bad guy while managing to maintain that one raised eyebrow during that 1/2 hour TV show of my youth.

So now, 40 years later, in Montreal's Little Italy district on the second floor of a commercial meat distribution business I was trying to figure out the solution to a problem I had never encountered before. How is that for a unique set of circumstances ? Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate these odd ball problems since they tend to challenge me and open the door to some excitement laced with new ideas. We especially need that sort of thing in these times where little feels like it means anything at all. I wanted to get this machine fixed and wrapped up like a dozen chicken thighs. That had become my resolve and this was all I needed.

It is good to have a goal while injecting meaning into what you do, but at the time, I didn't know that I would have to rebuilt him from the brains to its' shoes. Luckily, we were in the 21st century now, so rebuilding "him" for real was possible mostly due to all the aftermarket replacement parts that are now readily available to any yahoo with a credit card. Same for our world I would think, we know so much more than we did, yet so many of us are too stupid to know what we know. This is the information age and all. The key is that all we got to do is remember what works and what doesn't. 

Hell, I knew I could do make this work I thought, right down to that iconic raised eyebrow. In fact, it was time to rethink it all vis a vis pinball repair. And why not reassess all the things we do & know while we are at it, maybe this time around we can lace our lives with meaning and resolve instead of agitated non-sense & hype over things that just end up meaning so little.

R.A.B.

A service call on a sunny Saturday morning during the fall of 2020. Yes, you got it, right smack amidst a freakin' worldwide pandemic. Yet, people still wanted to play pinball. It was like they were just flippin' the bird to the looming second wave. Pinball repair had become a social service of sorts allowing those who were truly flipping out a chance to forget their woes for a while.

We were at the beginning of another decade, and what got us here was beginning to resemble the 20's of the last century. Our excesses, our greed and an exaggerated sense of self importance had become increasingly obscene, and predictably, change was waiting to come down on us like a huge party pooper. Now and then it is good to remember what triggered changed in the world last time around. And so now we were due for another "adjustment", this time in the form of a virus accompanied by some dangerous sociopaths acting as heads of state. As for the good people who wanted a better world, well, they first would have to get rid of this "bug" and those political power hungry parasites before rebuilding could begin.

So under these circumstances, it's ironic that I was ready to take on the Six Million Dollar Man. According to the owner of this 6 player Bally pinball machine, it was "sluggish" and had been that way since he acquired it a decade ago. I asked for clarification on what "sluggish" meant, but got no more adjectives from this man who was short on words. On site, I observed that the six million dollar man played as if it were in slow motion, like the action sequences of the show. This intrigued me so I decided to take on the job. I remembered those slow motion segments of Lee Marvin jumping 20 feet in the air and tackling a bad guy while managing to maintain that one raised eyebrow during that 1/2 hour TV show of my youth.

So now, 40 years later, in Montreal's Little Italy district on the second floor of a commercial meat distribution business I was trying to figure out the solution to a problem I had never encountered before. How is that for a unique set of circumstances ? Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate these odd ball problems since they tend to challenge me and open the door to some excitement laced with new ideas. We especially need that sort of thing in these times where little feels like it means anything at all. I wanted to get this machine fixed and wrapped up like a dozen chicken thighs. That had become my resolve and this was all I needed.

It is good to have a goal while injecting meaning into what you do, but at the time, I didn't know that I would have to rebuilt him from the brains to its' shoes. Luckily, we were in the 21st century now, so rebuilding "him" for real was possible mostly due to all the aftermarket replacement parts that are now readily available to any yahoo with a credit card. Same for our world I would think, we know so much more than we did, yet so many of us are too stupid to know what we know. This is the information age and all. The key is that all we got to do is remember what works and what doesn't. 

Hell, I knew I could do make this work I thought, right down to that iconic raised eyebrow. In fact, it was time to rethink it all vis a vis pinball repair. And why not reassess all the things we do & know while we are at it, maybe this time around we can lace our lives with meaning and resolve instead of agitated non-sense & hype over things that just end up meaning so little.

R.A.B.