My wife says every family has this drawer. I do not believe every family has this drawer. Do you have this drawer? Do you know a good solution to this drawer?
We have a silverware drawer, organized, maxed out. A sharps drawer, organized, maxed out. Ziplocs, organized, maxed out. Bbq tools and oven mitts, organized, maxed out. But all this shit has no particular category so fuck me right. I gotta have an awkward necessary crap drawer. Maybe I should post all my drawers and crowdsource me some sense into my kitchen.
the average electric drill is used for 7 minutes in its lifetime.
This smells like a fact pulled from someone’s ass. This article thinks so too.
Supposedly, supposedly. There were lots of links in Steffen’s post, but no source was provided for the assertion that the average power drill is used for a total of just six to twenty minutes during its lifetime. (I find the numbers highly suspicious. I wrote to Steffen asking for his source, but haven’t heard back.)
I use drills everyday for work and have one at home that doesn’t get used much because if I want to get handy I don’t want to drive to work to get one.
Transaction costs, in this context, might also be called pain-in-the-butt costs, and pain-in-the-butt costs don’t have to get very high before you say, “Screw it, I’m buying a drill.” You accept, even welcome, low levels of utilization in order to avoid onerous transaction costs. And, yes, you are being totally rational. Utilization isn’t everything.
I use drills everyday for work and have one at home that doesn’t get used much because if I want to get handy I don’t want to drive to work to get one.
The average person has fuck-all experience with power tools, they don’t use them every day. They can pull the trigger and it goes brrrrrrr but they don’t know what the options on the rotation piece are, they don’t know about different types of chuck, they don’t know which gear setting to put their drill in. They use it for the absolute minimum amount of time possible and then put it away. You’re clearly a professional if you’re using them every day, most people are not.
I don’t know whether the 7 minute claim is true or not, but the idea that most drills barely get used and spend most of their time sitting about is not very difficult to believe. I’m quite a handy person, and even my drill spends most of it’s time doing nothing because I’m not drilling every single day, just as and when DIY jobs come up.
In a world drowning in ewaste, and lithium being a precious resource, why are we collectively wasting so much on individual drills when, as JubilantJaguar said, we could own these things communally and not create so much waste.
The idea of a communal toolshed for your street, block, tenement, whatever, isn’t the same as having tools sitting at work. Work for most people is a commute away. Communal toolsheds would be local. They ideally shouldn’t be any more than 10 mins walk away. Can you really begrudge a 10 minute walk for the sake of your wallet, environment, and community?
This also helps the young get into DIY easier. Most of my mates growing up barely did any DIY or tinkering, not because they weren’t interested, but because the cost of getting the necessary tools was prohibitive as a teenager. It’s taken me years to accumulate the toolbox I have now, and many of the items in there are hand-me-downs or second-hand. A communally owned toolshed gives everyone instant access to tools regardless of personal wealth or resources. If a power tool dies, £150 spread between multiple households is nothing compared to £150 for an individual household.
Managing it, caring for the tools, ensuring they’re returned, and in a good state, are obviously hurdles to be addressed, but if communal toolsheds were the cultural norm then they could easily be overcome. We manage to do it with books easily enough, why not anything else?
I’m guessing that 6-20 minutes is like the actual time spent driving screws or drilling holes. Each one takes maybe a few seconds. 6-20 minutes in that case translates to hundreds of screws driven, even on the low end. So not nearly as worthless as the time makes it sound.
Sure, it’s a factoid. Maybe it’s 20 minutes. But we all know it’s very low. Seven minutes is an overestimate for my drill.
have one at home that doesn’t get used much because if I want to get handy I don’t want to drive to work to get one.
Yes, and it’s a problem. The possibility of borrowing one from your neighbor is passed over entirely and the alternative is to drive to get another one already in your possession.
All of this is completely unsustainable behavior at the scale of the planet. I suppose you’ll get in a huff and take this personally but I really am talking about all of us. As I said, I have a drill myself and bought it for exactly the reasons you cited. I just think we could all do better.
But the transaction cost of borrowing my neighbors is much higher. I have to talk to him for 20 minutes, he has to find it, it’s not charged, it’s a piece of crap and the Chuck doesn’t work. An hour process for a 10 second job to hang the shelf.
I think a drill is a terrible tool to use as an example since it’s used for many purposes and almost any household chore. A better tool would be a Sawzall, it’s built for a niche tasks and can be essential for that one cut. I will absolutely have a chat with the neighbor to avoid trying to make a cut with a hand held hacksaw blade trying to cut a stud in half. I use it so infrequently I absolutely don’t need my own.
But an awful lot of households do have electric drills and apparently the average one gets less use than yours. Mine certainly does. Whatever the exact number of minutes-per-lifetime, you’re gonna have difficulty persuading me that every single household of all the 8 billion people on earth needs its own electric drill and that there’s not a better way of organizing things.
And that’s my whole point: America’s hyper-consumerist comfort-oriented lifestyle, where everyone has a closet overflowing with semi-useless junk, where talking to one’s neighbor is a waste of precious time, is just not a realistic goal for a sustainable civilization. Nor even particularly desirable, I’d say. Again: please don’t take this personally, I’m criticizing a whole system and I too have an electric drill (though not a Sawzall, whatever that is).
