Entropy is a scientific term that represents the concept that systems generally degrade without effort from order to chaos over time. A broken plate breaks easily without any real thought, but it doesn’t just reassemble itself into a plate.
I feel the cold dark hand of a more common definition of entropy as I age. I see my body decaying and don’t see it suddenly getting better like it once did. My lumbar back, my weird digestion system, my vision: all have decayed rapidly over the past six months or so. And the doctors aren’t suggesting any fixes. I ponder exactly how much longer I have before the failures of my body stack up tall enough to lay me low.
But it is the small stuff…
But sometimes the trend of universal decay is made manifest through a very small thing. An object or device that worked without complaint for several years suddenly just… doesn’t. I find this to be particularly frustrating, and one thing just caught my attention today amongst many such small failures.
A hose reel that has faithfully reeled in hoses via its cranking arm now presents a crank that just spins ineffectually. I looked and can see a possible fix by drilling a hole through the point where the handle connects to the ‘drive’ shaft and putting a bolt in place, but I don’t feel particularly energetic about this solution. the space is limited, and I might just be delaying the inevitable long enough to be really frustrating.
Doubly frustrating, the hose reel was working fine when I last used it. We had some work done around the house and the contractors used the hose. So the actual failure, and the incredibly messy job done rolling the hose back onto the reel, is someone else’s “fault”. But I’m sure the failure point was there, waiting to be triggered at random by the next user.
Worse still… fixing it is harder
These little problems are additive. Using this example now have a broken hose reel. If I had never had a hose reel, I could just go buy a new one. But now I have to remove the hose from the broken reel first, put the hose on a new reel, and then dispose of the old broken reel. The garbage pickup won’t take it, so that means a trip to the dump most likely. I’ll just want to keep it simple, but Irene will want to add in other things to be disposed of.
Next thing I know it will be a whole day of work springing from one broken hose reel: more work by far than if I had never had a hose reel to begin with. Not a scientific definition, but it feels like entropy to me.
