The sentiment resonates with me. I'm the only person under 50 I know that changes their own oil, let alone performs other routine maintenance like air filters and break pads.

Some people are just built different.

Yeah that there, that's getting to be incredibly uncommon.

And it's not hard to see why.

I had a GE washing machine start misbehaving one day. It would fill the tub, do a few spins to try and balance the load, start to spin up for a few minutes, stop. Try and balance the load, spin for a few minutes, stop. Then eventually just give up, without even draining the tub before unlocking the door.

Me knowing appliances pretty well, I already had the knowledge the service manual is probably tucked away inside the shell. Strike one going against most normal people, they wouldn't know to do that. Open that up, see how to get into the diagnostic menu and translate the error codes and run some tests.

Ok, so now I know it's a speed sensing issue. The speed the motor is reporting and the speed the tub speed sensor isn't making sense for the fixed gear ratio so it thinks there's something unsafe going on. That's a decent safety issue, but looking at the tub as it spins it's probably just a sensor issue.

The tub hall effect sensor was like $20 shipped from the GE parts website. Quick and easy to swap out. No dice, still not wanting to spin up. More reading online, it's likely the main motor inverter board. Well, that's pretty deep in the machine, could also be the motor assembly itself which would be covered under warranty, let me call a GE service guy to come.

Service guy comes, he plugs some wireless adapter into a hidden USB port, fumbles with it for a few minutes with an iPad with a shattered screen, gives up diagnosing the issue. Writes up an invoice proposal for $900 worth of parts and labor for him to swap out a ton of things, or a referral code/discount coupon for me to buy a new unit.

I decline the order. Surely not all this shit is wrong with the thing. I find the inverter board online from a third party site for <$100, was available from the official parts site for not much more. Start unplugging it a bunch, and notice the motor hall sensor pin wasn't seated very well. I don't want to put it all together again just to find reseating/gluing the connection together didn't solve the problem, so I just put the new inverter board in. Put it all back together and it's just fine for <$100.

I imagine it was just a loose connection for that sensor. This is probably still a perfectly functional board on my shelf. I'll keep it and the other sensor in case some other issues happens in the future. But it could have been just a loose connection that sent this nearly $1000 unit to the scrapyard if it wasn't for me bothering to look. It could have been an exceptionally cheap part. And the final fix I accepted was just somewhat cheap part.

In the end people generally don't care to actually fix shit, and I imagine the majority of people would have just thrown up their hands before looking for the service manual, called the tech, he would have made it obvious a new unit would be a better deal, and they would have taken it.