Zen and art of motorcycle maintenance quotes

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I have kicked myself mentally a hundred times for that stupidity and don't think I'll ever really, finally get 
over it. Evidently what I saw sloshing around was gas in the reserve tank which I had never turned on. I didn't 
check it carefully because I assumed the rain had caused the engine failure. I didn't understand then how foolish 
quick assumptions like that are. Now we are on a twenty-eight-horse machine and I take the maintenance of it very 
seriously.
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I found the cause of the seizures a few weeks later, waiting to happen again. It was a little twenty-five-cent 
pin in the internal oil-delivery system that had been sheared and was preventing oil from reaching the head at 
high speeds.

The question why comes back again and again and has become a major reason for wanting to deliver this Chautauqua. 
Why did they butcher it so? These were not people running away from technology, like John and Sylvia. These were 
the technologists themselves. They sat down to do a job and they performed it like chimpanzees. Nothing personal 
in it. There was no obvious reason for it. And I tried to think back into that shop, that nightmare place, to try 
to remember anything that could have been the cause.

The radio was a clue. You can't really think hard about what you're doing and listen to the radio at the same time. 
Maybe they didn't see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling. If you can 
twiddle wrenches while listening to the radio that's more enjoyable.

Their speed was another clue. They were really slopping things around in a hurry and not looking where they slopped 
them. More money that way...if you don't stop to think that it usually takes longer or comes out worse.

But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing...
and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody 
had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, ``I am a mechanic.'' At 5 P.M. or 
whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. 
They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job. In their own way they were achieving 
the same thing John and Sylvia were, living with technology without really having anything to do with it. Or rather, 
they had something to do with it, but their own selves were outside of it, detached, removed. They were involved in 
it but not in such a way as to care.

Not only did these mechanics not find that sheared pin, but it was clearly a mechanic who had sheared it in the first 
place, by assembling the side cover plate improperly. I remembered the previous owner had said a mechanic had told him 
the plate was hard to get on. That was why. The shop manual had warned about this, but like the others he was probably 
in too much of a hurry or he didn't care.

While at work I was thinking about this same lack of care in the digital computer manuals I was editing. Writing and 
editing technical manuals is what I do for a living the other eleven months of the year and I knew they were full of 
errors, ambiguities, omissions and information so completely screwed up you had to read them six times to make any sense 
out of them. But what struck me for the first time was the agreement of these manuals with the spectator attitude I 
had seen in the shop. These were spectator manuals. It was built into the format of them. Implicit in every line is 
the idea that ``Here is the machine, isolated in time and in space from everything else in the universe. It has no 
relationship to you, you have no relationship to it, other than to turn certain switches, maintain voltage levels, 
check for error conditions -- '' and so on. That's it. The mechanics in their attitude toward the machine were really 
taking no different attitude from the manual's toward the machine, or from the attitude I had when I brought it in there. 
We were all spectators. And it occurred to me there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, 
the most important aspect of all. Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.

On this trip I think we should notice it, explore it a little, to see if in that strange separation of what man is from 
what man does we may have some clues as to what the hell has gone wrong in this twentieth century. I don't want to hurry it. 
That itself is a poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care 
about it and want to get on to other things. I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly, with the 
same attitude I remember was present just before I found that sheared pin. It was that attitude that found it, nothing else.
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