Rob Sterling

All three of my uncles and my maternal grandfather Harry Ten Broeck made careers of electrical work or electrical engineering. One of my uncles helped build Telsat, and my grandfather installed the electrical conduit that powers the lights atop the Chrysler Building. Harry’s father Charles was a book printer on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, like his male descendants he made a career of assembling very small things and ordering them very precisely. Charles’ father Henry was a master cabinet-maker, which is likewise a task of some intricacy, and Henry’s father Peter was a high-end carriage wheelwright, an obsolete career field that combined the worst aspects of geometry, carpentry and the decorative arts, and required an unusual attention to detail.

Unlike all the men in the above paragraph I do not have a Ten Broeck Y-chromosome. I have a Sterling Y-chromosome. The Sterling males from the 1600s until the early 1900s made their livings by moving into territory occupied by natives, chasing away said natives through violence or the threat thereof, clearing all the trees off the land, farming it for two or three years, and selling the land to people who actually had some interest in farming. And then they would start the process all over again. We Americans used to call this career field “pioneering” but now we call it “marginalization of indigenous peoples” and “slash and burn agriculture.” There’s not too much intricacy involved, and like wheelwrightry it’s not a growth industry.

I dread intricacy. As a kid I could never match the nimble dance my grandfather’s fingers would perform through the innards of alarm clocks, radios and various other solid state household electronics. I’ve disassembled and reassembled computers and various other complicated things, but I’m always aware of my shortcomings relative to the men in my mother’s family. They’re just much better at it than I am.

At the end of June I dropped my iPod. I thought it was secured to my belt, and it was wrapped in a Marware Sportsuit Convertible iPod sock. Despite suffering no exterior damage whatsoever from the three-foot fall, the screen cracked in several places and no longer displayed meaningful information.

The iPod is pretty intricate, and so when I broke the screen I naturally took it to the local Apple retailer to have it repaired. They don’t do that, it turns out. Neither does Apple. When I called Apple I was told that by dropping the iPod I voided the warranty. “That’s fine,” I replied, “I still want to have it repaired.” The friendly and helpful tech support rep told me, “off the record,” that I could look on the web for companies who would do the work. I looked. Not one of them wanted less than $150 to replace the $10 LCD on the $300 iPod. See, Apple has been selling so many iPods that (until it switched over to color screens this summer) it has consumed nearly the entire global production of mid-size LCD screens. So a screen costs a couple bucks to make, but a couple hundred to buy if you’re not Apple. Big demand is chasing small supply.

And so it turned out the Sterling Y-chromosome skillset might be useful after all. Like my ancestors sneaking onto Cherokee land, I staked out a position on eBay. I waited for a screen to show up lacking the obvious keywords that would draw other stalkers. After five weeks of waiting, one showed up. I descended in the darkness of night, sniping the auction in its last moments, and walked away with a perfect Apple iPod 4th Gen screen for just under $50, which arrived several days later. Sufficiently heady was the experience that when the screen arrived I tore open the packaging, popped open the iPod with an eyeglass repair kit and rapidly dissassembled the device. It wasn’t easy to replace the screen without tearing through the fragile ribbon wiring that makes small devices like the iPod possible. My dexterity was challenged. But the venture was ultimately successful. I am once again the owner of a functioning iPod. Whew.

My new iPod case leaves much less to chance.

Filed under: Ejecta, Technology