A number of years ago, I was involved in a company project to replace the office copier. We only had one, but we made copies like nobody’s business. Not just a copy here and there, but things like 20 stapled copies of a 50 page document. It wasn’t like a huge company, but it was more than an occasional copy.

I was involved in the evaluation project so I got to talk to the engineers who came out to install the trial copiers. Talking to those people told us more about the copiers than we ever wanted to know. And the frequency of their visits during the two week trial told us the rest.

This morning, I got an email from a colleague. Seems the water heater in her house had died. Water heaters do that.

our hot water heater went out last night… it’s upstairs in the attic, accessed through our daughter’s closet… we’ve had plumbers out since 7:45 this morning… they had to drag the old rusty one down the stairs across the house… dripping all the way… so while they are still finishing up, I’m cleaning up…

It is interesting to me. As the copier guy explained it, when they are designing a copier, they design it for maintenance. People don’t just buy a copier (at least not the large, multi-function, copies, folds, staples and makes-coffee-on-the-side kind) … they rent them, or they buy them with a maintenance contract. Whether they make money for the manufacturer is partly how much money they can make off the sale or lease. But it is largely how much it costs to keep them running.

Before they can make the copier and ship it to customers, the maintenance department takes a long look at the copier. They break it and fix it. They take it apart and put it back together. They insist on tiny changes that can mean the difference between a 30 minute and a 90 minute repair call. And they do all this because it matters long term.

But when they build a house or a car, they don’t seem to care. If your water heater is a pain to repair, that is your problem. The builder is gone. And if your car was built so that it takes 4 hours to replace a water pump, that is your problem. The manufacturer doesn’t seem to care either.

Putting a water header in an attic while a house is being built is one thing. Replacing a water header in an attic after the house is completed is another.

I wonder how houses and cars would be built, if maintenance mattered to them like it matters to the copier companies?