I have spent the morning watching the frustration of a “specialist”, a “supervisor” who came to make our relatively new freezer make ice cubes.  He replaced the two men who tried to make it work last week. The ice cube maker has not been performing for some time, since we use relatively few cubes in the course of months. We find that buying a bag of ice cubes for just under a dollar fills the machine that dispenses them.  This works fine but the machine and electronics inside the side-by-side refrigerator freezer do not.

I think that the simpler our lives are simpler machines should compliment us since we have come to rely on them for so many of our comforts.  We have gone far beyond using a match to make a fire or light a candle much less lighting a gas stove.  Everything is electronic these days and I can sit in my comfortable chair (that enables me to recline, also) and point a remote control at the television, a radio and be entertained.  I can reach behind my head to flick on a switch to illuminate my reading and can unzip my telephone and make a call through the magic of wireless connectivity.  My computer does the same thing.  I can zip my wireless mouse across my flat screen and type with my keyboard that is at a distance and un-tethered to the CPU. Incidentally, I can speak to my telephone by touching its screen.

But, my icemaker does not make ice and the “supervisor” has admitted defeat.  It seems that he, like me and many other men, did not look at the schematics and directions in the “how to” book that came with the machine.  He said, in parting, that he would try to order another part that does not seem to be working (there is a voltage drop somewhere) but that I should consider going to the maker of the machine for one of their specialists.

I fear that I will continue to buy bag ice and letting the door levers handle dispensing crushed or cubed ice and ice water.  We got along nicely without the water being asked to come, fill the half moon shaped containers, and then be dumped into the big bin inside the freezer.  It is a simple operation and bypasses all the electronics, little electric motors, and their connections.  Machines should be a lot simpler and less subject to failure.  The humans who come to fix them should be much more prescient about things that can go wrong with the machines that serve us.

Freezers are complicated and so is life. In retirement, we tried to go to a simpler life-style with the help of quite a few of our electronic friends.