Soft Serve Ice Cream Machine Repair
Soft Serve Ice Cream Machine Repair
A wee adventure in self-directed learning
Not too long ago, in a college dining hall, a group of painfully clever people sat around a table, bemoaning the fate of a soft-serve ice-cream machine that had recently gone the way of the đŸ˜‚ emoji. ‘The students loved the frozen custard’, one of the cognoscenti explained, ‘but it proved far too expensive to keep the machine in operation.’ ‘Indeed’, another added ‘far too few people know how to fix those things, and those that do charge a pretty penny for their services.’
Marvelous to say, no one mentioned the opportunity lurking beneath this sad and sorry tale of undergraduates doomed to spend The Freest Years of Their Lives™ bereft of reliable access to creamy, squishy, mouth-freezing felicity. Indeed, had one of my table-mates been suitably sheep-dipped in the grim science, he would have explained that same sort of ‘barrier to entry’ must be preventing people from going into the business of maintaining soft-serve ice-cream machines, thereby making such repairs more expensive than they would otherwise be. Likewise, if any of the mourners had been English, and thus au fait with irony, she might have added that, by making economists of people who might otherwise have become soft-serve machine technicians, colleges and universities have themselves ensured the idleness of Mr. Whippy.
In all fairness, my own recent research (by which I mean the watching of YouTube videos) suggests that there is more to the epidemic of deadlined soft-serve ice cream machines than the diversion of talent. Since the dawn of the Information Age, manufacturers have interposed a layer of digital displays between the machine itself and the user. Thus, in addition to learning in the ins-and-outs compressors and fan belts and such, the would-be soft-serve ice-cream machine technician must become one with the weirding ways of circuit boards.
Specific courses in trade schools and community colleges teach some of these skills, but not all of them. Likewise, completion of an apprenticeship in an established trade will impart a portion, but only a portion, of the savoir faire needed to get a recalcitrant Mr. Softee maker up-and-running again. However, unless a would-be technician undergoes the in-house training manufacturers reserve for their employees, there is no ‘one-stop shopping’ for all of the instruction proper to a passed master of this art.
With this in mind, the would-be fixer of these highly peculiar devices can do one of three things. He can take a lot of partially-relevant courses. He can seek employment with a maker of soft-serve ice cream machines, perhaps with a plan to go rogue once he has maxed out on training. Or, he can, with the aid of instructional videos, a tour of duty at a fast food joint, and a fritzy frozen custard maker he picked up at a going-out-of-business sale, teach himself all that is needful to know.
Go find an 'antique' soft serve machine from the pre-digital age. It will work longer, better, be easier to repair, and probably put out tastier iced cream. Go retro-tech. No digital boolsheet.
Repair Cafes https://www.repaircafe.org/en/ are very popular with the younger crowd and the "oldster" crowd. They find, in common with each other, the desire to fix things that are broken and make them work. I believe Repair Cafes got started in Denmark, but chapters have cropped up all over the US and the world. When I first arrived in Bristol I'd go and volunteer just to meet people, drink tea, repair things that were broken, and learn how to fix things I didn't know how to fix.
I've always been a Luddite - give me analog, knobs, dials, and things I can repair and make work again. Planned obsolescence never confines itself to things, it eventually creeps to people as well. It's also lazy and not proper Capitalism at all. Adam Smith is doing backflips in his grave.
All that said, I've never seen the allure of soft-serve or Dairy Queen. Proper ice cream, churned on your grandmother's back porch with fresh picked June strawberries or ripe summer peaches, and heavy cream from the local farmer's cow, is one close-to-Heaven thing we can have in this world. Soft-serve is arguably, the Lady Esther Face Cream version. But, each to their own mileage.......