Opus 2012-153, A Sabbath for Machines

When I was in seminary I worked a lot of different jobs to pay the bills.  I scrubbed toilets, mowed lawns and worked Christmas at Macy’s.  For a time I worked with another seminary student who supported his family as a painter while he went to school.  He was an interesting type of guy that is getting more rare in our culture.  He was a simple, country boy at heart yet he was also a well read intellectual.  Today we are tending toward isolating the two but in our past the combination was not unusual.

One time he was sharing some of his reading about how machines worked better and lasted longer if they were given a Sabbath.  He wasn’t trying to make any big point, he was just passing on something he had read.  He said that farm machines that were left idle a day a week tended to break down less often.  He also said it was possible to let cows go unmilked on a Sabbath.  His information was that they then produced more milk than a seven day milking.  That went against everything I had ever heard about cows but he was the farm boy, not me.

But I wonder about machines.  God laid down the principle of the Sabbath.

(Exodus 20:10 KJV)  But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:

Now I want you to notice that God extended this day of rest to the servants and the animals.  It was all inclusive.  It would not take much stretch of the imagination to extend this to the machines that we work with.

This got my mind to wandering.  Have you ever noticed that things borrowed seem to break more often than they do for the owner?  Sometimes it is because the borrower does not practice the same care as the owner.  Sometimes it may be a lack of skill resulting in misuse.  But I ask myself, “Do machine parts develop stress patterns?  Do they develop a memory of response and when someone uses them a little differently, do they fail because it is a different pattern?”

Think about your body.  When you use muscles that have been idle you know it the next day.  Too long of exercise can deplete stored reserves of minerals.  Do machines with wood, metal and plastic parts have parallel qualities?  It could just be wear patterns.

One reason to give your machines a Sabbath is that it may require you to get some rest also. 

homo unius libri