Maybe a lot of people here are comparatively pure software people and are surprised, impressed, and grateful when they successfully do technical stuff in the physical world!

When I was a kid, I was already a computer nerd and writing my own programs, yet I had a friend from school who manually replaced his PC speaker (I forgot why, but he did this) that was wired rather than jumped to the motherboard. I was super-impressed, as this felt like a completely out-of-context kind of action to me, like, you can actually physically modify or replace components in your computer!?

Taking a basic bike maintenance class as an adult cyclist was also pretty amazing to me, as there were some actions that seemed mysterious and magical to me that got somewhat demystified (on a machine that I had used every day for years).

I also gave a talk at one point about how side-channel attacks based on physical properties of computers are often so surprising and counterintuitive for software people (including myself) because we so rarely think about how computers are physically instantiated and how that physical instantiation may leak various sensitive information. (In practice, it often does, if you can look at it appropriately.)

I think some people gravitated to software because we love the abstraction and power of "this is an abstract machine" (we don't get to play with formal systems that work automatically in other areas of life). "Wow, it follows arbitrary sequences of formal instructions perfectly!" The refrigerator in the anecdote is, well, not an abstract machine.

As other people in the thread have said, there are places and times where more familiarity with the physical world and physical details of machinery would probably be a lot more routine and less surprising.

No. But yes, in my opinion.

Encouraging each other to become independent is a good thing, even if it's boring for some of us.

In the United States, I would guess the percentage of adults who have repaired a household appliance is 10-25%. Most people just replace appliances when they break. I believe that most people could accomplish a repair like the one in the post, but most don't have the tools or the confidence.

Exactly.

Reaching for a repairman (or worse, replacing the thing) is in many backgrounds and countries still a modern luxury. Instilling the idea that things like this are left to "true" professionals is the goal of decades-long commercial conditioning of now generations of humans. So yes, no wonder that someone sees this as amazing - I see this as simply what one does; fixing things.

My mum knew how to do a quick fan belt or radiator fix in the middle of nowhere when the car broke down, and I wouldn't call her a hacker for that, and it really was nothing special, in the context of how widely people fixed things like that.

And then people don't know how to sew on a proverbial button, so, yeah.

I thought it was a reference to internet-connected freezers destroying frozen goods around Europe.

Except kind of... "I think there is a joke here somewhere... Im just not sure how to complete it."