AS00001086: Bricklayers Make Money Too

You’ve seen this photo. Three generations of the same engine, seven years apart. I will not pretend I know a lot about engines or whether the third engine is built in a way that is objectively better, but I will pretend that all the assumptions about it are correct. Supposedly, Elon is big on deleting things, which is objectively hard, but in the end it makes you understand what those things are doing better and that makes it easier. There are a lot of moving parts there.

There’s the old story about bricklayers - a man walks past a construction site and asks three workers working on the same thing what’s up. The first is laying bricks, the second one is making 1000 pounds a week and the third one is building a cathedral. There is also an assumption about all the moving parts and behaviors that surface when you become the second or third guy. Like, the third guy is proud of the cathedral he is building and he will bring his children there once it’s done so they can feel the pride too. Those assumptions are neither here nor there. When Sir Alex Ferguson told the story to his players trying to get them out of a slump, it worked - Beckham scored and immediately started prancing, laughing and yelling the score: Cathedral 1 - Bricklayers 0. Sometimes the ultimate bricklayer builds the cathedral and that is maybe the beauty of this world.

Anyway, this is about my coffee machine.

My DeLonghi stopped working. I don’t know the exact price, only that it was my first espresso maker. That’s probably a sentence no other member of my lineage has ever said. What broke with my espresso maker? It wasn’t the pump or the boiler or the board. What broke was this plastic thing - the molded tab inside the machine where the coffee sump sits, where the portafilter handle locks into. A little piece of it chipped off.

The part is AS00001086. DeLonghi calls it Frame Central. It is a black plastic skeleton and it costs like 40 bucks.

To install it you take the entire machine apart.

The whole fucking thing apart. Every wire, hose, grinder, boiler, board, stuff I don’t even know the name of. And then you put it all back together.

Who decided to make it this way? Probably nobody. Was there a meeting where someone said this is what we will do, and why didn’t the grownups show up, hug the person and just tell him hey dude come over here let me ask you something? Think about all the decisions that were or were not made in order for this thing to end up on my desk years later on a Sunday. Also, it keeps happening - I found a video of someone having to do this exact same thing. The guy does coffee machine fixes as a day job, so he probably knows a thing or two about this.

This is everywhere, this is how everything is done. This is how the world works. It’s all a mess under the surface, a giant cobweb behind everything, from bank transfers to the software that keeps the emergency rooms running. From wooden frames in the new builds down the street to that emergency shut-off button at the gas station.

I am not saying it’s bad. It’s part of the process that allows us to keep moving forward and lets people work on perfecting the stuff they feel passionate about once the bricks are already laid down. What is bad is that during the 2010-2020 period, it felt like there was no cathedral to build. Zero interest rates made building cathedrals impossible - you see, those cathedral makers, dreamers and unique people as they are, are not idiots. They can’t starve to death and finish the cathedral at the same time. It might sound crazy, but during this time, the returns on doing something hard were actually way lower than the returns on not doing anything.

That’s the part that makes me optimistic. I know how it sounds. I know there are some people who feel like the greatest of injustices was done to them because the free money tap got closed. But the water was getting murky, the soil was muddy, the plants were dying, the air was getting heavy, and they were going to get robbed of something that was theirs that they didn’t even know existed.

Now the math makes sense again.

Everything is as it should be. Bricklayers still make money, but they have something aspirational to look forward to.

My machine works. It took a whole weekend to fix it.

Cathedral 1 - Bricklayers 1