I have this old clock that belonged to my mom. My dad gave it to me years ago after mom passed away. I have mixed feelings about having the clock. I love it because it was my mom's, but it also holds some bad memories. You see, it chimes. It counts out the hour and rings once on the half hour. Or at least it used to. Now you never know what number it will ring. When my mother was at home dying from cancer, she asked for the clock to be unplugged. Hearing the hours count down really angered and frightened her. Mom passed away. I decided I wanted to get the clock fixed so I could remember the good hours we had with her. I took it to a local clock shop the other day. "I know this has no particular value as a clock, but it was my mom's and I need to get it fixed," I said to the shop owner. I went on to describe the problem. "We get a lot of these in," he told me. "Here's what I do. We remove the clock works   and replace it with a battery-operated movement   that chimes electronically," he told me. "You can't fix this?" "No, we don't have the time nor the parts." I thanked him and went home. I called a few other places and was told the same thing. "How incredibly sad," I told the last one disappointedly. How incredibly sad that we have become a society that replaces craftsmanship with convenience and easy fixes. We copy the original instead of creating something new. We duplicate  ; we don't originate  . Sadly, the same goes for our attitude to life itself. Each of us is an original, one of a kind. But we find it so much easier to copy another style than to develop our own. We are wannabes   rather than hey-world-look-at-mes. We fail to see the real value in who we are, so we spend our lives trying to be someone else. What did the clock shop owners tell the author?
The parts that the clock needed were electronic. It would cost a lot to repair the clock. They had never repaired a clock like this before. They could only make the clock electronic.