One of life’s greatest honors—I approach the cleaning of a friend’s vacuum cleaner with the seriousness of a cardiac surgeon removing an arterial blockage. This patient was a particularly serious case.

A lot of philosophy, medical care, and vacuum cleaner repair relies on INTUITION. I had not planned to spend an hour on this. Something sounded off...and the rollers weren’t turning. (Sometimes this is slippage from hair caught in the axis of the cylinder.) But this was worse.

A l w a y s — take a photo of your car’s engine, the blender’s guts, your patient’s brain SO YOU CAN PUT HER BACK TOGETHER AGAIN WITHOUT MISSING ANY SCREWS.

(This guy taught me everything I know about appliance repair. He fixed so many rice pots, VCRs, neighborhood bikes. Had that rare gift of being able to diagnose mechanical problems intuitively, almost instantaneously. Four years gone this month...I miss him deeply, every day.)

I grew up being lectured about good design and quality construction. My grandfather repaired wooden wagon wheels in Germany. Precision and deep strategic thinking are family values.

*** Someone designed this vacuum to carry its own spare belt in its roller cover! #wunderbar

There is a second vacuum cleaner in the house. I used it to deeply clean the interior, roller, casings and motor of the first vacuum cleaner.

“A vacuum cleaner that vacuum cleans another vacuum cleaner” is an apt definition of how you get good thinking.

“[The great scientists] are men with bold ideas, but highly critical of their own ideas: they try to find whether their ideas are right by trying to find whether they are not perhaps wrong. They work with bold conjectures and severe attempts at refuting their own conjectures.”

(Karl Popper, “The Problem of Demarcation”)

WELL—this is a terrifying observation when you’ve sewn up the patient and sent them into the recovery room.

Easy fix. Whew. (That’s why you take photos because sometimes it is not this simple.)