Typically, it is fairly easy to remove a door trim. There is usually a screw around the handle, one or two screws on the bottom of the panel, and then a uniform line of clips along the inner edge of the trim. This was a rather fancy car though, an expensive Audi, and it was "too good" to be easy to work on. So after about twenty long minutes of searching, I had discovered that I needed to pop of the trim panel by the handle (which is difficult to do without damaging the door trim), which concealed two screws, and I had to pop off the arm cushion, concealing an additional screw. After this I popped off the panel and looked at the window assembly, realizing taking it out would be no easy task.
The regulator itself (the silver part in the picture) was easy, just three easy bolts, but the hangers on each of the arms (the black parts in the picture are the arms, and the smaller silver parts on the arms are the hangers) were shoved up behind the top of the door. Eventually, after about half an hour of trial and error that took a painful toll on my hands, I had found the perfect wrench and the intricate form in which I had to fit and move my hand, I began unbolting them from the glass. This itself took about ten entire minutes because of the lack of space I had to move the wrench.
So finally, I had taken out that devilish window assembly. It was time to put in the new one, which was an equally difficult and time consuming process, basically having to do the opposite I did to take it out. After it was installed, and the trim was put back on, I turned on the car and tried the window. It didn't go down. I felt like I had just x'd out of a hundred page paper that I never saved. Frantically, I took the trim panel back off, and checked everything. The assembly was installed as it should be, there was power going to the regulator, all the switches were connected, I was dumbfounded. Shamefully, I sat back in the passenger seat trying to think of how I would present this embarrassing failure to Bex, and even worse, the teacher whose car it was. Then suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I had noticed something. The window lock switch was flipped, the windows had been locked. In utter disbelief, I flipped the switch and tried the window, and as the glass moved down, my anger went up. I could not believe it, all of that work and frustration, and the whole time it had been as simple as a locked window.
Something as simple as the window lock being engaged had caused so much frustration, which could have been avoided if it weren't for my ignorance to the simplicity of the situation. If I would have thought about the window as simply as I could, and every part that could play into effect, I would have thought to check the window lock before even starting. This applies for all car problems, the most basic principle of auto repair is being able to see the car in its simplest form, all of its parts, the building blocks of the car.
This brings me to Democritus, and his building blocks, atoms. He believed that, "Nature really is built up of different “atoms” that join and separate again" (Gaarder 46), much like cars are made up of different parts, that can all be replaced and rebuilt. Democritus used atoms to look at the world in its simplest form, and thought that not only was everything made of atoms, but there were different types of atoms, such as soul atoms, much like there are different types of parts in a car, and that, "When a human being died, the soul atoms flew in all directions, and could then become part of a new soul formation" (47), much like when a car is totaled, its parts are reused to make new cars, or repair existing cars.
His ideas can be applied to repairing cars, an everyday problem that I face, by looking at a car like Democritus looked at the world around him. Take the window problem for example. I should have looked at the window and its related parts in their simplest form, part by part. If I would have checked everything that could be causing the problem, instead of just jumping to a conclusion, I could have avoided the frustration.The other way his ideas play into fixing a car, is that in order to fix a car, you need to know how whatever section your fixing operates. And the only way to understand that is by learning about all of the parts, or "atoms," that make it up. So when learning how a car works it is necessary to look at the car the way Democritus looks at nature. So if you can mentally take apart a car, seeing it in its simplest form, and how all of its parts fit together, there is nothing on that car that you can't fix.
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