1182: Fixed That For You

I’ve had a week of not having a lot of luck with technology. Firstly, I was reminded that my electric piano was suffering a sticky key issue on the B above middle C (which is quite a commonly-used note) and proving rather difficult to play effectively. This was annoying, because as I noted yesterday, I’d just come into possession of the official piano arrangements for the Nier and Final Fantasy X-2 soundtracks along with some fan-arranged printouts of a variety of anime and game pieces.

Secondly, my PS2 Slim mutilated my Ar Tonelico 2 disc right in the middle of one of the endings I hadn’t seen, causing it to freeze up completely and not be able to go any further. (I have since replaced the PS2 Slim with a PS2 Fat — which hasn’t arrived yet — and acquired a new copy of Ar Tonelico 2, but that’s some money I didn’t really need to spend.)

Fortunately, one of these problems has been rectified thanks to Andie’s willingness to get her hands dirty and tinker around inside things. (Get your mind out of the gutter.) Loosely following some instructions online, we took the casing off my Yamaha P80 and had a look inside. It wasn’t immediately obvious what was causing the key in question to stick, but as it happened, the process of popping it out (which we didn’t even manage to do completely, just sort of half-out) and popping it back in again completely fixed the problem. This was, as I’m sure you can imagine, extremely pleasing as it means 1) I don’t have to attempt to fit my piano into the back of a Peugeot 207; 2) I don’t have to drive it 25 miles to the nearest Yamaha engineer; and 3) I don’t have to pay aforementioned Yamaha engineer £100+ to get it fixed. Don’t get me wrong, I would have happily paid Captain Piano-Fix his fee in order to get things sorted, but given that the fix was apparently that simple — I guess the key must have got knocked out of its normal place somehow, perhaps while we were moving house — I’m glad that I don’t have to do any of the above three things.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen something get “fixed” by peculiar means. Back in university, I came into possession of a Sega Saturn, which I still own to this day (though I no longer have any games for it). The controller that came with the Saturn didn’t work very well, so, having nothing better to do that evening — my housemate was out and no-one fancied going down to the Union to get obliterated on Juicy Lucies — I took it apart and decided to see what I could do, despite not having any clue whatsoever about how it worked. Eventually, I ended up cleaning the contacts on the circuit board using a piece of kitchen towel dipped in vodka — I honestly have no idea why this particular combination of things seemed like the right thing to do at the time; I was possibly a bit drunk — and putting it back together again. Astonishingly, it worked after this. To date, I have no idea if my ridiculous efforts to “fix” the thing actually had any effect or whether it was just the simple process of taking it apart and putting it together again.

I guess the moral of this story is that if something is broken (and out of warranty) then there are worse things you can do than pull out all the screws, pull everything out and then put it back together again. Obviously don’t try and do this on a human body, however, because 1) human bodies don’t have any screws and 2) they’re a lot harder to put back together once you’ve disassembled them, which is why degrees in Medicine take so long to complete.