The answer to this question can be found in Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values and I'll provide the two key paragraphs here. Reading this book helped me understand why I insist on doing all my own car and motorcycle repair:

"The shop was a different scene from the ones I remembered. The mechanics, who had once all seemed like ancient veterans, now looked like children. A radio was going full blast and they were clowning around and talking and seemed not to notice me. When one of them finally came over he barely listened to the piston slap before saying, 'Oh yeah. Tappets.'"

...and further on, after the "mechanics" had severely botched a repair on his motorcycle, wondering to himself why it happened that way:

"But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing...and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, 'I am a mechanic.' At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job. In their own way they were achieving the same thing John and Sylvia were, living with technology without really having anything to do with it. Or rather, they had something to do with it, but their own selves were outside of it, detached, removed. They were involved in it but not in such a way as to care."

kourt
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austin, tx