Stories from the Shop, or As The Wrench Turns 2

An interesting thought hit me; something I’m sure won’t cross the minds of most people.

We all know about the tragic disaster recently fallen upon Japan. Just the Earthquake alone will take years to recover from!

We had a customer in the other day with a late model BMW. He had a question about the electronic display on his radio. The display uses little blocks to create the words and numbers. After a while, some of these blocks burn out. After enough of the blocks quit working…well, you just can’t read anything anymore. It looks like the car is trying to speak to you in Klingon. We call it pixelizing.

I really didn’t think too much about it; it’s not uncommon. In fact, it’s something we’ve been dealing with since the early ’90s with the first LED Instrument Clusters.

I called a distributor and inquired about the price and availability of the part.

I wasn’t real surprised at the answer I got from the dealer. I called the customer and reported back with the pricing. Once again, I wasn’t real surprised at the customer’s reaction. The replacement radio was going to set the customer back about $800.00. The customer asked about the possibility of getting a salvage unit from an auto salvager. Ok, fair question … once upon a time.

In today’s vehicle, almost any of the many electrical/computer components are programmed to the car they’re installed in. The replacement units from the factory come with no information in them. Just like buying a hard drive for your home computer, blank. So with that option out of the question, I told him there is one other option. I could remove the radio and send it to California where they would repair his radio. The drawback to this option is the fact that between shipping it back and forth, and the repair time, he’ll probably have a hole in his dash for about 2 weeks.

(Now that you’ve got the background, here’s where it all ties together.)

I called the repair facility in California to get an estimate time and cost of repair. I was told, “Oh, yeah, we do those all the time, BUT, the circuit boards come from Alpine.”

I’m thinking, “Yeah, OK, so?”

“Alpine ….. Japan. We ran out of the circuit boards last week, shipments are on back-order, with no estimated release date.”

You know, I hadn’t thought of that. How much of the devastation in Japan is going to start impacting everyone in everyday life? True, the world has gotten smaller. We are an electronically addicted society. And how much of all the electronics that we use come from Japan? And how many repair parts for things are made and shipped from Japan? I am now interested to see how this will effect all of us in the coming months. There are so many of us that expect instant gratification. I wonder how many will want some electrical component repaired and when told it may take months to get the parts say, forget it, I’ll just go buy a new one …oh wait, those come from the same place, you can’t get a new one any faster.

Anyway, back to my customer… our final decision, find a radio station he like and leave it there. Listen to CD’s, or his iPod/MP3 player, we’ll worry about reading the display next year!