Programmers are supposed to possess the virtue of laziness: rather than doing something by hand, if they see a way to automate the process they’ll invest the time in doing that, so that the work itself can be done more quickly. This is supposed to save time in the long run, like an initial investment in capital that comes back in increased profits. (Of course the idea is that you will want to do the work again at some later date, and won’t have to recreate the automation.) So yesterday I put this philosophy to work, on the task of winding a bobbin.

(Why wind a bobbin? I printed some docs as a booklet and wanted to do a rough-and-ready thread binding to hold them together. Only my book-binding bobbin was empty. That’s why wind a bobbin.)

I’ve got a beautiful old hand-cranked sewing machine, which the bobbin fits (it’s one of the tiny ones that fit underneath the foot, not the big clunky ones that sit up on top). The sewing machine is built into a wooden case, which locks shut (with a built-in key) when not in use so that you can pick it up by the lid without all the mechanical bits and pieces falling out. The first obstacle on my path to filled-bobbin-hood was the lock. The key had broken off inside it, probably during one of my several recent housemoving exercises.

Such a lock would ordinarily not be too difficult to pick — it’s not intended to keep people out, just to hold everything together. But the fragments of key inside jammed the mechanism something wicked. I spent some thirty minutes trying unsuccessfully to extract the key-crumbs, before considering other angles.

Any pro will tell you, forget the lock and look at the hinges. Indeed, they had external screws and came off in a jiffy. But that left the locking bar to perform what used to be their duty (that is, instead of the lid opening at the lock and pivoting on the hinges, it would open at the hinges and pivot on the locking bar). And the locking bar is long and straight and fits rather snugly into its socket, so while I could peer in through a half-centimetre gap on the hinge side I still couldn’t get any closer to the machine itself.

Finally I got the damn thing open, simply by inserting a screwdriver close to the lock and applying unnecessary force. (To my surprise, this caused no damage except for a little scarring of the wooden base at that point.)

The next difficulty that presented itself was figuring out the bobbin-winding machinery. I have done this before, but it was a long time ago. And there’s a lot of mechanisms in a mechanical sewing machine. I decided I had it more-or-less right, and the bobbin installed, but nothing was working. So I repeated all the steps, looking for anything obviously out of place. It seemed I hadn’t engaged a little locking device properly, that would bring the bobbin-winding machinery into contact with the main drive wheel. So I engaged it (with a satisfying little click)… still nothing.

Several iterations of this procedure later, I realised that the whole assemblage was a trifle loose on its mounting. In fact I had everything set up correctly, but this extra slippage was letting it droop and lose contact with the drive wheel. (Sadly there seems to be nothing I can do about this, it’s a rivet mounting so there’s nothing to tighten.) So I held it up by hand, and wound my bobbin.

It took approximately twenty seconds.

The entire procedure, slightly over an hour.

It’s a special kind of laziness.