Last month I was sad. My stereo amplifier was not working and the audio repair guy in McKinleyville told me he was only working on tube amps. Lo, let despair rain from the heavens; let suffering reign; let the miserable wallow in their failures, rank with the stench of their disappointments.

Fortunately a well-timed remark from a friend reminded me that I could try going to the monthly Repair Cafe, so there I was on Sunday waiting for some help from one of the fellas who knew how to work on electronics without killing themselves. The room was filled with supplicants hauling in one item of junk apiece, waiting for it to be fixed; the scene reminded me of medieval serfs carting the dying to the latest miracle-man prophet hoping for a cure. Lamps and bicycles and sewing machines made up the bulk of the patients, though there was a couple with a DVD player the approximate size of a hope chest and a few people with computer monitors. 

My grandfather, most of his life a construction contractor with a generous streak, once told me that when selecting a repairman, people looking to get something fixed have three options to choose from but can only pick two: fast, cheap, and done well. Choosing always makes the third impossible. Going to the Cafe means opting for cost (free) and quality (though many of the volunteers told me not to expect much; fixing stuff is for most of them either a hobby or something done in a past life, and there also isn’t a ton of spare parts laying around). It is not a speedy process, though not at all by any fault of the volunteers. It took about an hour and a half of waiting until one of the electronic whizzes could give me a hand. 

Martin noticed me sitting around with my amp and — rejoice! — said he had worked in audio for some 30-odd years and could check it out, but not before some light interrogation. 

“Thrown any really loud parties recently?” he asked me. I denied the charge. 

“Are you sure?” I said I was. 

He hmmmmed. “Maybe you got spidered.” 

Disgusted but curious, we popped the top off and inspected the Sony’s innards. Every bit of the circuit board and the fuses and all of the wires were covered with dust — and Martin noticed something covering up a shiny node: a bit of spiderweb. He had been right. A speck of speaker wire making a small short probably hadn’t been helping either. He told me to hose “the SHIT” out of it with some canned air and take a Q-Tip and some denatured alcohol to my dirty flea market find. After some deep cleaning and fuse-testing, another volunteer found an old computer speaker and we hooked it up. It hissed; everyone was thrilled. 

Anywho, I didn’t have any cash on me to lend some more weight to my “thank you”s, and since several fixer-upper volunteers mentioned they wanted to get a few more people in there with stuff to mend, I hope this will do: the Arcata Repair Cafe is the second Sunday of every month at the Arcata Community Center, and if you have a broken household item light enough to carry in, you can try getting it fixed there. For free. I wish all of the kind people who spent a chunk of their weekends helping me out great riches and everlasting happiness.

Update, 10/22: A spokesperson for the Repair Cafe has asked us to clarify that the event doesn’t always happen on the second Sunday of the month at the Arcata Community Center; there will not be a Repair Cafe in December, and the event in January will be at the Eureka Municipal Auditorium. Make sure to check their Facebook page for up-to-date info.