Last year I repaired my grandfather's old wall clock instead of buying a new one. I'm a twenty-nine-year-old IT support worker in Nairobi, in Kenya, and the clock has hung in our family home for over fifty years.
It's a wooden pendulum clock, about the size of a small suitcase, with a glass door, Roman numerals on the face, and a brass pendulum swinging inside. It chimes every hour. My grandfather bought it with his first salary as a railway clerk.
About two years ago it stopped completely. The pendulum would swing for a few minutes and then just stop, and the chime sounded strange and weak. My mother assumed it was finished and suggested buying a modern clock, but I couldn't bear the idea of throwing it away.
So I asked around and found an elderly clock repairer in the old part of the city, in a tiny shop full of ticking clocks. He opened the back, looked at it for about two minutes, and said that the oil inside had dried up and turned sticky, and one small spring was broken. It took him about two weeks. He cleaned every part, replaced the spring and oiled it. It cost less than I'd feared, roughly the same as a cheap new clock.
I decided to repair it partly for sentimental reasons. My grandfather passed away when I was a child, and the chime is one of my strongest memories of his house. But I also believe we throw too much away. My job is fixing computers, and I hate seeing perfectly repairable things go into the rubbish. Now it's ticking again, and my mother admits she's glad I didn't listen to her.