As a child, I always enjoyed taking things to pieces to see how they work and as I grew older my interest progressed to a point where I then enjoyed putting things back together. More often than not, whatever it was I had reassembled never worked again, or if it did work it developed some kind of quirk. Even up to my teenage years I had a reputation for breaking things and the irony was never lost on my family when I received my qualifications as a mechanic.
This all stems from watching my dad fix cars on our driveway. I found it fascinating, watching him turn a wreck of a car back to its former glory. And if that wasn't enough to sow seeds into my subconscious, there was also a garage full of tools and chemicals for me to play with. Blowtorches and airguns make quite an impression on a young boy. Couple all that with weekend episodes of The A-Team and you can understand why my career path was set in stone long before I ever realised it.
Now I'm past the age my old man was when I used to watch him work and I still enjoy the challenge of dismantling things to find out what's wrong and then finally rebuilding it again to see it work like new. To my family's complete and utter surprise I've become quite good at what I do and there isn't much I won't tackle. Trucks, cars, cameras, I'll take on most jobs. If it's mechanical and it's been put together with human hands then I'm confident I can repair it. I'm stubborn in my optimism when it comes to repairing things and the thought of sending something to a shop to be fixed provokes my ego to the point where I am incapable of saying "No" whenever someone asks me to fix something. Quite admirable you might think, to be able to deconstruct things that most folk wouldn't even consider to investigate. But it's this stubborn attitude that has landed me in a whole world of frustration this weekend...
My girlfriend's daughter asked if I could replace the glass back to her Iphone8 and being that I've successfully replaced most parts on these defect-stricken phones, I thought this would be a relatively easy task. After checking out a couple of YouTube vids I confidently accepted the job knowing that while this looked slightly laborious it was simply a case of perseverance. It's just a flat slab of glass glued to a metal chassis and all I have to do is separate the two parts. Easy-peasy!
OMFG! How wrong I was. This is, without a doubt, the most god-forsaken task I have ever had the misfortune to encounter(And this is coming from someone who works on Renaults!). In the video tutorial, it shows a dainty-handed oriental lady separating the glass like she's peeling a fucking orange! At no point did I ever see her slip and gauge a blade into the side of her hand. Nowhere in the 15-minute video did she stop to pluck shards of glass from her pasty white face. Not even a single profanity was uttered.
Well, I can tell you from painful experience that my own tutorial would be, A) - Much longer (By about 4-days!), B) Full of swear words, and C) a blood bath. My first session almost blinded me and the second session didn't go much better either. Using a scalpal to dig under glass that has been glued on with an adhesive strong enough to bond lava is not a task for the faint-hearted. I've spent nearly 4hrs on this phone and this is how far I have got...
And of course, being the conscientious professional that I am, only the finest tools are used...🤦♂️
It's hard to describe how annoying and dangerous this job is, so to give you an idea here is a list of things I'd rather do...
The last one is probably a step too far, but you see what I'm getting at. If anyone ever asks you to replace the glass on an iPhone you make sure you hurt them, really badly, because they obviously hate your guts or they would never ask.
There's a good reason why phone shops go through all the trouble of stripping the innards out of your phone so they can simply replace the whole back panel...It's because only tight-fisted, stubborn old men would be crazy enough to do it any other way.
