Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture

Disruption is Normal Blackouts, Breakdowns and the Elasticity of Everyday Life Frank Trentmann

And there are blackouts in LA tonight An evident lack of light tonight
An increase in desire, you’ll catch me Hanging out on a wire
Cutting the voltage to your power line And the lights, go, out.

Now you cannot affect me I feel no electricity Now you cannot control me I feel no electricity

And the lights, go, out

Hybrid, ‘Blackout’, from the album Morning Sci-Fi (2003)

It was a stinking mess. In John Kyffin’s draper’s shop in London’s East End the toilets were blocked and overflowing. Since the water company had cut back supply in July 1895, water had slowed to a trickle, leaving his toilets with ‘no flushing remedy’. He and his shop assistants had nowhere to go; some were even taken ill. For Kyffin and other East Enders it was a return to ordinary life under drought (‘Court Report’, Daily Chronicle, 22 July 1895; Trentmann and Taylor 2006).

Breakdowns and shortages are a regular feature of everyday life. Indeed, some disruptions, like traffic jams and blackouts, have evolved into routines themselves. Others have had devastating consequences, bringing in their train mass migrations, disease and death, like the drought that ravaged the northern hemisphere in 1921, killing several million people in northern China and southern Russia. Disruptions, however, are not limited to developing societies, or to natural causes. John Kyffin lived in one of the most developed pockets of the world, the ‘heart of empire’, in a metropole that was amongst the first to have a network delivering a constant supply of water – except when it broke down, as it repeatedly did. In the last decade, water shortages have once again become a prominent feature of life in many affluent societies, disrupting the quotidian rhythms of bathing, gardening and other waterintensive practices. They are part of a broad range of interferences, ranging from serious natural disasters, like the Canadian icestorm of 1998, and technological accidents, such as at the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979, to quotidian disruptions like congestion, electronic spam and power cuts. In Barcelona in the summer of 2007, for example, 350,000 inhabitants had no power for two days. Commuter trains stopped running. There were no traffic lights. In hospitals, the elevators were stuck. Shopkeepers had to sell by candlelight (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 18/19 August 2007: 7). The blackout that swept across Ontario and the American East and Mid-West on 14 August 2003 affected 50 million people. Not all disruptions are this large and dramatic, however. In the United States, the average customer loses power every nine months for a total of 214 minutes, not counting the additional effects of storms or hurricanes (Apt et al. 2006: 51). Even more quotidian, in Italy the flickering of lights or a blown fuse are normal, as many homes are on lower tariff, low-wattage electric circuits that trip under the pressure of washing machines and other appliances.

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Arguably, the advancing interdependence of technological systems and life-styles has made contemporary societies more prone to disruption than ever before. This is, in part, for technological reasons. Communication and transport systems all have increasingly come to depend on tightly coupled electricity networks and computer programs. Blackouts can demobilize sewage pumps, with serious consequences for public health, shut down the computers managing traffic controls and communication, set off fire alarms and deactivate electronic locks on garage doors. But it is also because increasingly complex rhythms of daily life have become more dependent on enabling technologies, making smooth coordination ever more difficult.

In many parts of life, disruption is becoming more frequent, not less. Traffic congestion is a good example. In the thirty-nine largest cities of the United States, the number of hours lost by travellers due to congestion has trebled in recent decades. In 1982, the average person driving in Boston or Chicago during peak hours (6–9 a.m. and 4–7 p.m.) lost twelve or fifteen hours a year. By 2005, it was an entire working week (forty-six hours each) (Texas Transportation Institute 2007: Table 4). One obvious way to reduce congestion would be for people to adopt car-sharing. That the take-up of such solutions has been so limited, traffic researchers recognize (Bhat et al. 2005), lies in no small part with people’s increasingly flexible and frequent use of the car for non-work leisure and family activities. Disruption here is the price paid for the sake of coordinating an ever more complex life-style.

This chapter looks at disruption to illuminate the tenuous, fragile nature of everyday life. In contrast to most studies of blackouts and other shortages, where the focus is on how to manage disasters, I am turning to breakdowns here to open up the temporal fragility of habits and the elasticity of everyday life. Disruptions reveal the flexible side of habits and routines so often imagined as stable and stubborn.

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They offer a snapshot of rhythms as they unravel and are braided back together again, capturing the work that is needed to keep them going. Disruptions, in this view, are not freak accidents or aberrations but natural, constitutive features of lived normality. It is important not to confuse disruption with disorder. Breakdowns may trigger individual road rage or anger at frozen food melting away during a blackout, but, collectively, communities are remarkably creative in producing alternative orders. Rhythms and habits are interspersed with disjunctures and connected via suspensions, interferences and repair work. Disruptions thus reveal the elasticity of everyday life. They also open up its politics. A power failure, a water shortage or a public transport system breaking down can raise questions about accountability (who is to blame), entitlement and social justice (who should get what) and, most profoundly, about ‘normality’ (how can or should members of a society live). Disruption therefore is a particularly useful way to explore connections between practices, politics and socio-technical systems.

Disruptions are as varied as they are plentiful. Accidents, breakdowns, a product flaw, strikes and disasters differ in scale, dynamic and effect. A flat tyre is not the sinking of the Titanic. The effects of a burst local water main are not those of a fire at a power station, which can plunge millions of people into darkness, as happened in Engköping, Sweden, on 27 December 1983. Some disruptions are small, like the newspaper that is again not delivered in time for breakfast, but can irritate people more than the much larger one-off damage caused by a flooded basement. Many disruptions are invisible, like the temporary hardware breakdowns of spam engines, and only brought to our attention by software alerting us to delays in email. Would a 30-second stop at a subway station in front of a red signal be experienced as a delay, before Tube conductors began to inform us about them as a matter of routine, apologizing for the ‘disruption to our journey’? All these are, again, different from major disruptions of socio-economic cycles, like a depression and mass unemployment, which, as Marie Jahoda, Paul Lazarsfeld and colleagues showed in their pioneering study of Marienthal, Austria, in 1933, changed the most basic rhythms of bodily time and movement, leading people to walk more slowly and drift through the day (Jahoda et al. 1933).

‘Disasters’ have been the type of disruption that has received most attention, especially from experts on contingency, crisis management and the organizational risks of tightly coupled systems (Perrow 1999; Scanlon 2001). We can also, however, come to disasters from the other end, asking about how ordinary people cope with them. How do disruptions play themselves out, once they have struck? How do people respond? How (and how much) do disruptions transform the rhythms of everyday life, in the short- and in the long-run. It is easy to date when a disaster strikes. But it also carries a longer tail behind it, and its length depends on social and political dynamics, separate from whatever had triggered the initial breakdown in the first place. For example, a power outage hit Buenos Aires on 15 February

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1. It lasted eleven days, affecting 600,000 residents. Protests and battles over compensation, however, continued well after reconnection (Ullberg 2005). In other cases, the prevention of disasters can require deliberate smaller-scale disruption and the active participation of people willing to adapt their habits. Rolling blackouts or rota-cuts of water that hit certain groups of users sequentially can avoid a systemwide collapse. So, too, can campaigns to induce consumers to use less water and energy in expectation of a serious shortage. At this level, it becomes important how people think about the nature of the challenge. In the early 1970s, Americans who saw the energy shortage as the ploy of profit-hungry companies were less like to adopt energy-saving behaviour than those who believed it was a genuine geopolitical or environmental crisis (Gottlieb and Matre 1976).

People’s experience of disruption is relative and highly subjective, and this influences the elasticity of their responses and the resilience of systems. For some British commuters interviewed in 2005, ‘congestion’ meant standstill, whereas for others it was ‘driving along at 20/30 miles an hour . . . where you’d otherwise be bombing around at 90 miles an hour’ (Department of Transport UK 2005: 41–42). Some drivers had come to hate congestion so much that they refused to visit their children during the day and instead would only drive the 20 miles in the evening. Others lived with congestion by turning their car into an office on wheels. Here are examples of how the rhythm of one practice (driving/congesting) impinges on others (socializing, working). It is important to stress that disruption is not automatically experienced as frustration or altogether negative. A survey of commuters in Austin, Texas, found a correlation between stress and highway mileage, but also noted that 37 per cent felt their commute was ‘somewhat’ or ‘very enjoyable’ (Bhat et al. 2005: 22). The privacy of the car, to be able to select the radio channel of one’s choice or simply open and close the windows whenever one feels like it, makes congestion more acceptable to many than the noise and enforced intimacy of public transport (Department of Transport UK 2005: 70).

There are, then, good reasons for seeing the production and consumption of disruptions as entangled, not separate processes. The failure of public utilities offers a promising way to probe more deeply into this relationship. Because of their potentially devastating impact on public health, safety and order, power shortages have attracted considerable attention in disaster studies.¹ Here analyses of crowd behaviour loom large, in part because of the historical proximity of disaster studies to military and psychological concerns with panics and the collapse of authority during the Cold War and in the wake of the Kennedy and King assassinations. At the same time, electricity is also an ‘enabling technology’ for many quotidian practices (Nye 1998), so its disruption affects routines that are not strictly speaking matters of public order and safety, such as watching television, putting the toaster on or reading a book by lamplight. Just as there has been an ever-tighter coupling between organizational systems, so networks and practices have become increasingly entangled.

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In Actor-Network-Studies, breakdowns like the Columbia shuttle disaster have appeared as illustrations of how easily ‘objects flip-flop their mode of existence’, from ‘completely silent intermediaries’ to ‘full-blown mediators’ (Latour 2005: 81). This line of thought might be extended to the nexus between technologies, users and practices. How easily do practices flip-flop? This is not just an academic question but touches on the basics of behaviour change. In addition to asking about the resilience of infrastructures – how much damage can a system withstand, and how easily is it repaired – we should also ask about the elasticity of rhythms. How far can rhythms be stretched, and for how long? Why do they snap in some contexts but not in others? These are timely questions as energy and water industries are beginning to look beyond supply-based solutions to modifying consumption in order to reduce stress on crisis-prone systems.

In addition to component failures and maintenance problems (considerable in the United States), power shortages register the growing number of technologies and activities powered by electricity. In Finland, for example, 40 per cent of all houses were still heated by wood in the 1960s; by 2006 this figure had dropped to a mere 10 per cent. Most homes are kept warm through district heating fed by combined heat and power plants. This is a relatively energy-efficient system (utilizing c. 85 per cent of the fuel energy value) compared to producing electricity separately (c. 45 per cent). But it also means a tight interdependence between electricity and heat, making Finland particularly vulnerable to a power shortage; at an outside temperature of –26 degrees Celsius, it takes less than forty-eight hours for the temperature to drop from +22 degrees Celsius to freezing point. The incidence of blackouts might therefore be rare (thirteen in rural, four in populated areas in 2006), but the consequences are disastrous; in November 2001 when two storms hit Finland, 800,000 people in total were affected, including 1,600 for more than five days (Landstedt and Holmstroem 2007).

In warmer regions, too, technologies have facilitated new cultures of comfort that have added pressure on energy systems. The spread of air-conditioners has been accompanied by an increasing rate of blackouts in India (Wilhite 2008: 117–121) but also in Italy. Mediterranean countries are becoming more vulnerable to public supply disasters during heatwaves. During the heatwave of 2003, the national grid in Italy introduced power cuts as early as June – the first in twenty years. In France, demand for electricity was almost 10 per cent above the previous year (IEA 2005: 39–41). This interweaving of technologies and habits takes place at the office as well as in the home. Coffee and Xerox machines are switched on routinely on arrival in the office, while computers are left on after departing in the evening. In eleven offices surveyed in San Francisco and Washington, DC, in 2000, a mere 44 per cent of computers and 32 per cent of monitors were switched off at night (IEA 2005: 81).

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What have been the responses to blackouts and more generally to the difficult business of keeping supply running smoothly? After the 2003 heatwave, French organizations were heavily criticized for their habitual, mechanistic response (Lagadec 2004). But beyond such emergencies, recent power shortages also tell a story of considerable and creative effort to encourage people to change habits and consume less. ‘If you sing in the shower, choose shorter songs’ was a slogan during the 2003 electricity shortfall in New Zealand. In Japan, preparing for the summer peak in the same year, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry set up an ‘energy-saving team’ of 1,350 women headed by a popular actress, who visited shops and companies to encourage them to set air-conditioners at higher temperatures and adopt other energy-saving measures (IEA 2005: 61).

The success of such strategies has varied significantly. Energy savings in France in 2003 were 0.5 per cent. In Brazil, two years earlier, the figure was 20 per cent. Whereas the French case points to the stickiness of habits, Brazil tells a tale of elasticity within vulnerability. Brazil depends for 80 per cent of its electricity on hydropower, making it extremely vulnerable to droughts, like the one in 2001. By May 2001 it was apparent that only serious reduction in energy use could save the country from repeated blackouts. The shortage lasted for ten months. The government responded with a stick-and-carrot policy. It combined mandatory energy savings (rationing) with a national awareness campaign and a mix of penalties and incentives. The biggest savings were in the public sector – street lighting alone dropped by 35 per cent. The commercial sector reduced its demand by 15 per cent – raising temperatures in cooling systems as well as introducing more efficient lighting systems and switching to gas-based equipment. But a good deal of the reduction came in private households. The government distributed over 5 million fluorescent lamps to the poor. However, it was affluent households with higher energy use which showed the main savings: households using more than 100 kWh/month dropped their energy consumption by 20 per cent, whereas those using less than 100 kWh/month did not change at all. Customers who used between 201 and 500 kWh but failed to meet the target of reducing their demand by 20 per cent were subject to temporary interruption. And they had to pay 50 per cent extra (IEA 2005: 24–30).

How were such targets implemented, and how much disruption to everyday life did they involve? The available evidence, such as the reports compiled by the International Energy Agency, is of an aggregate kind and unfortunately says little about how such savings were absorbed by particular consumers in their daily activities. Some of these dynamics, however, can be inferred. Poorer households found it much harder to lower their already moderate energy use. Households with greater demand also had greater elasticity for change. They achieved this in part by using existing technologies less, like air-conditioning, in part by changing the mix of consumer durables in use: middle-class households switched off their freezers. This alone amounted to a saving of 100 kWh/month. Ironically, the elasticity provided by freezers had been the result of another, earlier form of economizing behaviour. In the high-inflation 1980s and early 1990s it made good sense to invest in frozen food at the beginning of each month. Presumably, the arrival of the freezer led to fewer, more concentrated shopping trips, while unplugging it accelerated the rhythm. The response of Californians in the wake of the 2001 electricity crisis affords a point of contrast, in spite of a similar reward/incentive scheme. Here unplugging the second refrigerator was extremely rare (4 per cent). People were more likely to watch less TV (12 per cent), unplug their computers (15 per cent) or turn off the air-conditioner (30 per cent) and lights (62 per cent) (IEA 2005: 38).

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Many changes to daily practices, however, are not voluntary and individual but collective and imposed. Shops, industries and services are important levers in modulating everyday rhythms. Most directly, energy shortages affect the rhythm of work. In Britain, in February 1972, over a million people were made idle on a single day by the power crisis resulting from the miners’ strike (Guardian, 16 February 1972). During the 2001 blackout in Stockholm, Ericsson told its 11,500 employees to stay home on Monday (Deverell 2003: 59). In Tokyo, some industries have increased the number of shifts. In Ontario, the government responded to the major blackout of 14 August 2003 by closing down all non-essential parts of the provincial and federal government: more than half of federal employees did not go to work in the second half of August. During peak power demand, Beijing forced over 6,000 enterprises to take week-long vacations (IEA 2005: 52–53, 80) . Other evidence, such as in the wake of the 35-hour week adopted in France in 2000, suggests how the re-ordering of the workday significantly alters the rhythm of leisure and social activities, favouring longer, more intensive practices like reading and listening to music, as well as spending more time with family and children (Viard 2004). Studies show how difficult it is for people on shift-work to develop a healthy sleeping rhythm and to coordinate practices with people who are on a different schedule (Rudat 1978). It would be interesting to know more about how disruption-induced changes to working hours affect the rhythm of other practices.

It is especially practices depending on mobility and light that are affected by energy-saving measures. Car-free Sundays re-ordered the rhythm of the weekend during the energy crisis of the early 1970s. In more recent years, one frequent strategy to lower energy consumption has been to change shops’ opening hours to save on heating, cooling and lighting costs; in Ontario, the department store chain Hudson’s Bay Company cut its energy use by a third in 2003. What did people do in the time the shops were closed? We do not know. One group of hospitals and nursing homes responded to the Ontario power shortage with a set of measures that left barely any quotidian rhythm untouched. Outside lights were switched off – instead of walking alone to their cars, people walked together with escorts. Staff were encouraged to bring cold lunches. Patients were asked to switch off their television sets between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m., disrupting the routine of watching soaps. And people were urged to use the stairs instead of the elevator. The company saved 12 per cent of its usual energy in the week after the blackout (IEA 2005: 81–82).

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How long would such measures have to be in force before new habits are internalized? The Brazilian case shows the difficulty of translating short-term adjustments – even when a power shortage lasted ten months – into long-term energy-reducing habits. By the beginning of 2003, electricity demand had almost returned to the same level as on the eve of the crisis. How much energy savings have resulted from changed habits, and how much from energy efficiency measures? In California, it is estimated that 70–75 per cent of the 4200 MW customer load reductions in the summer of 2001 came from life-style change, such as watching less TV or switching off the air-conditioning, 25–30 per cent from more energy-efficient equipment, appliances and buildings. It is the latter that are expected to have a life-long effect. Whether the former can perpetuate themselves is more doubtful (Goldman et al. 2002).

So far we have focused on measures aimed at avoiding serious blackouts. But what and who exactly is disrupted when the lights go out? One of the earliest detailed accounts of people’s reactions comes from the blackout that spread across the eastern seaboard of the United States in the late afternoon of 9 November 1965, affecting 25 million people. Six days after the breakdown, the National Opinion Research Centre (NORC) began to interview 1,313 people, offering a nuanced picture of where people were and how they reacted to the blackout, analysing groups by class, gender and location (children were curiously neglected). Significantly, this study was framed by a general interest in public reactions to national crises, reflecting concerns about potential panic and a vacuum of authority in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and the Kennedy assassination the following year; the report was commissioned by the Office of Civilian Defense (NORC 1966).

In fact, NORC researchers found that most people were not the least alarmed by the blackout. Two-thirds had experienced earlier power failures in their neighbourhood and initially thought it was an ‘ordinary’, localized event (NORC 1966: 10–11). People mainly learned of the seriousness of the event from neighbours, family and radio; most television stations were disabled throughout the blackout. There was no panic. ‘[W]ithout knowledge of its vast scope,’ the NORC concluded, ‘people could incorporate the blackout into their preformed conceptions of permissible permutations in their situations’ (NORC 1966: 13). Americans in 1965, in other words, did not expect ordinary life to be always running smoothly. They lived with an in-built degree of elasticity. Breakdowns were just part of normality.

What was the emotional response to the blackout? The majority reported that strangers were unusually helpful and friendly to each other. Only a small minority (3.6 per cent) felt that people were taking unfair advantage of each other. For a significant number, the blackout was an occasion to break with their normal routines and ‘make a holiday’ – 11.9 per cent total, rising to 26 per cent after 4 a.m. (NORC 1966: 24). Emotional responses diverged considerably, however. When interviewed, 31 per cent of men and 21 per cent of women said they ‘enjoyed it’. Interestingly, the rate of enjoyment went up the longer the blackout lasted. Interviewers noted the social dynamics of observed ‘mirth making’: joy was contagious. Fright, by contrast, was far less so. Only a quarter of women said they were frightened at some stage that others might ‘misbehave’. They were ‘so restless they couldn’t sit long in a chair’. But these feelings were short-lived and relatively ‘mild’. The dominant negative feeling was boredom and a sense of enforced passivity. Around one-fifth of people felt ‘bored’. Almost half the men and women interviewed were ‘annoyed’ that they could not do the things they wanted to (NORC 1966: 24, 50, 52–67).

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Above all, the blackout affected rhythms of communication and social interaction. The New York Telephone Company reported an all-time record of calls; it operated a full service with the help of diesel generators. Between 5 and 6 p.m., local calls shot up by 800 per cent. Interestingly, hardly anyone called the police, the electric company or the telephone operator. Most calls were to relatives other than household members (NORC 1966: ch. 4). And, instead of turning for information to City Hall or formal organizations, people turned to local ‘public affairs’ leaders in the neighbourhood, mainly men with higher income and education and links to voluntary organizations. The blackout, according to NORC researchers, demonstrated how disasters generated their own ‘nascent emergency system’ as the ‘social bases of the social system … spring to life’ (NORC 1966: 31, 37)

How a democratic society copes with disasters that immobilize formal social and political structures was a defining question for research in the 1960s. Studies since have broadly agreed that disasters do not tend to produce panic or normless anarchy (Scanlon 2001). Some researchers have gone so far as to postulate a timeless model of rational human behaviour: ‘The modern citizen responds to disasters in the same fashion as his ancestor.’ Citizens do not panic, they act as rationally today as they did when they had to protect themselves against harsh winters, failing crops or infectious disease without the help of modern technologies and medicine (Helsloot and Ruitenberg 2004: 98).

The problem with this view is simple. It fails to take into account that what is rational behaviour is shaped by the context in which people act, and this in turn varies, itself the result of social norms, institutions and the technological systems with which they are connected. Many disasters have sparked altruism. Two million volunteers flocked to Mexico City after the 1985 earthquake. In fact, too much altruism can set off more disruption: in 1999, when an earthquake hit the Turkish city of Golcuk, volunteers produced a 32-kilometre-long traffic jam obstacle for rescue vehicles. But disasters can also create an opening for bottled-up social conflict, resulting in open violence and looting. Vulnerability and the social resources for coping with disruption are unevenly distributed. The Chicago heatwave of 1995, which killed 700 people, for instance, hit elderly and poor African-Americans disproportionally hard, because of run-down buildings and infrastructure combined with isolation bred by crime and commercial decline; the Latino Little Village, by contrast, was a busy social and commercial district that facilitated inclusion (Klinenberg 2002: 91).

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And the elasticity of everyday life changes over time. It can snap. When the next major blackout struck New York on a blistering hot 13 July 1977 – this time affecting 6 million people – it hit a community scarred by recession, austerity and racial tensions. At Shea Stadium, play stopped in the sixth inning, with the Mets trailing the Cubs 2 to 1. In the heat, the 22,000 fans sang along for almost an hour to the Organist playing ‘White Christmas’. Elsewhere the atmosphere was less cool and convivial. In the ghettos, unemployment amongst young African-Americans stood at 40 per cent, more than double that in 1965. As in other disasters, many alarms of theft or fire proved false, but there also was real looting and arson. Firemen had to fight 1,037 fires – six times the average. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, ‘bands of determined men, women and even little children’ were roving the streets with crowbars, smashing shop windows and helping themselves to clothing, TV sets, liquor and furniture. In the Bronx, looters broke into the Ace Pontiac showroom and drove off with fifty new cars. On 125th street in Harlem, people walked off with bags full of steaks from a meat market. Altogether 2,000 stores were plundered and the police arrested more than 3,500 people, eight times the number during the 1964 and 1968 riots (Time, 25 July 1977: 12–26).²

Perceptions of what counts as ‘normal’ and what as unacceptable disruption have likewise changed over time. Technological systems, and the expectations of functional order surrounding them, have transformed the sense of what is an ordinary and what an avoidable breakdown. These values, in turn, are also shaped by politics that inform assumptions about the working order of society, about accountability, and about what people can and should do when things go wrong. Together, these factors influence how disruptions play themselves out. Disruption, in other words, alerts us to how rhythms need to be situated within both technological and political cultures. Three short examples illustrate the different dynamics at work.

The first example comes from a developed country with an unusually distinguished record of things breaking down or not materializing: socialist East Germany. The GDR was not a ‘consumer society’ in the classic sense, but people here too had a lot of stuff. The difference was that many private goods and services were scarce and shoddy or required ‘connections’ and many years of patience. Everyday life moved to the rhythms of queuing, making-do, things breaking down and trying to fix them. The case of the Sparwasser family of Oranienburg tells a sad, familiar tale. They were a family of seven with a disabled mother. Having waited for twenty years for a car, the family was finally able to jump the queue in 1986. After picking up the car from the VEB works in Magdeburg, the Dacia 1310 developed one fault after another. At 690 kilometres the radiator and speedometer ceased to function. Thirty kilometres later Mrs Sparwasser had to return it again because the starter would not work. At 3,200 kilometres the gear unit gave up. By 3,600 kilometres the ball-bearings had become defective. Two hundred kilometres later, the clutch went. Mrs Sparwasser was exasperated. Each time she went back to the VEB works she was told the problem had been fixed and everything was fine. Now the warranty was coming to an end. The family’s routines were thrown into chaos. The Sparwassers avoided longer trips and, like so many people in East Germany, had to use up their holidays to return and collect their defective product from the factory (Bundesarchiv Berlin 1986).

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