An Irishman's Diary

WHENEVER the Irish Timeslift breaks down these days, we get an e-mail from those nice people in the facilities department assuring us that an engineer has been called "to address the problem". Which always strikes me as a little odd.

Not that I have any objection to addressing problems. I do it myself all the time – it can be very therapeutic. Say it’s five minutes from deadline and my computer freezes for no reason, or causes everything I’ve written to disappear. I usually find it helpful to plead with the screen – “Please don’t do this to me now. Please!” – if only because it helps pass the nerve-racking moments until Mick from Systems arrives.

I often address problems with my car too. In fact, when it broke down on the M1 last year, for the second time in 12 months, I addressed the problem in terms that couldn’t be reprinted in a family newspaper.

Especially where you have a recurring difficulty with a piece of technology, I think it’s a common habit (it can’t just be me, surely) to personalise your relationship with the problem. Thus you talk to it regularly, sometimes cajoling, sometimes threatening, sometimes expressing gratitude when it behaves itself. And even on those occasions when I start out trying to fix (we’ll come back to that verb in a minute) a problem without addressing it, my resolution often fails me.

It might be a nut on a car wheel: the one that won’t budge even when you’re straining so hard that sweat is running down your face. Then the spanner slips loose, causing you to rap your knuckles. And suddenly, in spite of the vow of silence, you find yourself addressing the problem again – “Ye little b******s!” – in a way deliberately calculated to hurt its feelings.

So far be it from me to look down on others who do this. It’s just that you expect a more rational approach from engineers. And no doubt our facilities team would protest that there is a meaning of the verb “address” to cover such an approach (albeit usually with the addition of a pronoun and a preposition, so that the engineer, rather than address the problem, addresses himself to it). Fair enough.

But even this hints at a certain lack of confidence in the process. Surely the whole point of the engineer's visit is to get the lift working again, whereas saying he will merely address himself to the problem suggests the outcome is far from certain. Which, of course, may well be justified in the case of the Irish Timeslift.

I SUSPECT the latter-day fashion for addressing problems is yet another accidental by-product of the consultancy industry. After all, to fix something sounds like a simple (and cheap) thing to do. Whereas to address it (and then provide tailor-made engineering solutions) suggests the need for a team of experts and a 500-page report.

But it may also be that the verb “to fix” has just fallen out of fashion. Which, at least in the sense of “repair”, it has. It’s funny how this happens sometimes. A word may come from a good family and be well brought up. Then it falls in with a bad crowd and suddenly respectable people don’t want to be associated with it any more.

Consider all the negative connotations this verb has acquired. If a boxing match is fixed, for example, it’s never a good thing. If supermarkets engage in price-fixing, that’s bad too. No sane person – even an engineer – wants to be “in a fix”.

Being in a “right fix” is, paradoxically, even worse. And as for a “quick fix”, well, that’s usually no fix at all.

A politician who becomes known as a “fixer” will be frowned upon by high-minded commentators (although he’ll also top the poll in every election). And speaking of fixers, well-meaning friends may sometimes try to “fix you up” romantically. This is not always unwelcome. Yet even here, the phrase betrays the cynicism and desperation of the exercise: your social inadequacy being such that you require an engineered solution.

To top it all, a “fix” is something a drug addict needs regularly. So if the word is avoided by those other suppliers of unnatural elevation – lift operators – maybe it’s no wonder.

In fact, one of the few (generally) positive usages of the verb “to fix” is an American slang one, still considered suspect by English dictionaries. In this sense – meaning “to prepare” – one may fix breakfast, or one’s face. But typically, the word is used in abbreviated present-participle form, as “fixin’”. And the most famous thing Americans can ever be fixin’ to do is die.

All blues singers worth their salt have been fixin’ to die at some stage of their careers: it’s a way of life for them. Even Bob Dylan was fixin’ to die on one of his earlier albums, but that was 50 years ago now, so his condition must have been exaggerated.

No doubt there are blues legends doing it even as we speak in Chicago or New Orleans. That said, consultancy-speak is an insidious influence everywhere nowadays. Even bluesmen must do corporate gigs occasionally. So it would be no surprise if there are one or two dynamic, self-starting types who, rather than just fixin’ to die, are addressing their mortality problems instead.