Price of progress

Dennis Skinner of the Telefix shop on Sandringham Rd, Mt Eden, is talking retirement - maybe. Photo / Doug Sherring

Four cranes reach for the sky at the ever-burgeoning colossus that is Eden Park.

By-election billboards by the score make far-reaching promises of their own: "Get More Muscle.

Vote for Russel", says the green one. David Shearer (red) says he's "putting Mt Albert first". And Melissa Lee is blue with poetry. "Make Lee Your Local MP."

There's another sign in this same stretch of the Mt Albert electorate too. It simply says "For Sale". It stands outside number 39 Sandringham Rd, directly across from the sporting behemoth ("where legends are created").

We are talking about Telefix TV Services Ltd - a dowdy double-brick building that pays no more regard to the flashy, brash goings-on at the park than it does to the fervid electioneering clamour all around. It has time on its side: it's been here much longer than many of these pretenders.

Dennis Skinner is the boss of Telefix. His electronic repair and aerial installation business has been here for 38 years. But Skinner's fix-it business won't be here for much longer; not if the 1400sq m commercial and residential site he owns - which includes a neighbouring house around the corner in Rossmay Tce - is snapped up.

This is the price of progress. At its peak, Telefix had 22 full-time staff including two "office girls". That term alone tells you how long ago that was. They used to work eight hours a day, six days a week. Now they're down to one full-timer (Skinner) and one part-timer, plus a woman who helps out on the desk. The shop shuts at 12.30pm weekdays and is closed at weekends. Skinner is talking retirement - maybe.

They started out fixing valve radios and TVs, and they still do so today. Much of that gadgetry has been consigned to the Museum of Transport and Technology. But at least they know where to go looking for spare parts if someone comes in with one in search of repair.

They'll give just about everything else with a plug that's not behaving a look too, so long as it's not a cooking or cleaning appliance. A trawl of Skinner's Aladdin's cave-like premises gives curatorial documentation of every last domestic electronic gadget ever designed to enhance your aural or viewing pleasure.

Telefix has some impressive neighbours. Helen Clark had not entered Parliament when Skinner set up shop. But she became a regular client. Her electorate office, which still bears her name, is only a few doors down at No 65.

It is thanks to Skinner that Clark's short-wave radio, to which she often lent her ear, stayed in working order throughout her political career. And it was Skinner who always got the call when the telly broke down at the house Clark and husband Dr Peter Davis shared, just up the hill.

Telefix does as its name promises, and then some. It is a place of hopes and dreams and despair: a hospital for televisions, transistor radios, videos; tape-decks and reel-to-reels; computers and CD players and DVDs and all that usurp them.

They come seeking cure: the lame, the wounded, the dying; dropped off by the anxious and the ever-hopeful. Here in the television ward there is the wide-screen monstrosity that just stopped. There is the Sony that won't stop crackling; the Philips rear-projection TV that is beyond hope.

Size does not always count: one recalcitrant steroid beast can only produce a puny, shrunken picture on its big screen. Elsewhere, old age brings its own ailments: an eight-year-old amplifier has dry joints.

Some people seek miracles. "We try to help. But [sometimes] they want me to make their machine do things that they just can't do," says Skinner.

And then there are the clearly deluded: those who turn up insisting their equipment is sick. They pay their deposit and await the diagnosis with fretful anxiety - only to learn that the batteries are flat. Or in the wrong way. Or the plug hasn't been pushed in properly. "That's common. That's part of life."

Skinner, 67, has a piratical rasp and a gold tooth to go with it. He calls himself "the fixer". And, clearly, he was born to it. "Dad was the boss of the Pye factory in Waihi. Six hundred workers. He was chief, CEO, but they didn't call them that then. But then Philips took it over - and closed it down."

His dad - now deceased - resigned before the task of sacking the staff was handed to him. "He couldn't do that to his mates."

The younger Skinner got an electronics apprenticeship and finished it as an electronics technician at what was then known as the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation. Then he decided to do an engineering degree - but abandoned his studies mid-way. "I didn't like the academic life: I preferred the hands-on thing - my own business - you know, picking something up and fixing it."

Telefix was a bankrupt company when he got his hands on that. He'd set up his first business - Skinners Radio and TV - in Henderson, when he was 24. He'd not long got out of the Army after being balloted. "I had forty-two pounds and my own box of tools and some spare parts."

That was in 1963. He bought the drowning Telefix company in 1966. It soon became a perfect place to move his original business, which by now was growing beyond the bounds of the West Auckland basement he'd set up in. He moved to Sandringham Rd in 1971 and bought the site 10 years later, the same year Clark entered Parliament.

As it was then, so it is now. The interview starts in the staffroom - where it could still be 1971. A formica table has endured, if not stood, the test of time.

There's a Faggs drip coffee machine ("it still works!") and four very fatigued chairs. A Prestcold fridge/freezer old enough to be arthritic lords it over a carpet so old it really does need a lie-down. For decorative purposes, there's a Heart Foundation poster on cardio-pulmonary resuscitation.

In real estate terms it probably needs a bit of TLC. And that is what Skinner's business offers to the equipment brought to it. He talks of his current client base - although he would not resort to such anonymous terminology. He probably knows most of them by name.

"Twenty per cent of our customers are Greenies. They don't like dumping anything, you know what I mean? Often it's not cost-effective to fix, but their attitude is they'd rather save the planet, so they'll still get it fixed."

"Another 20 per cent is elderly people. If they got a hard disc drive recorder, it would blow their mind. They still want their video recorder for Coronation Street. So we fix them; that's what keeps us ticking along."

The rest, he says is largely "people with good, old equipment - the high-end stuff". He notes, too, a surge in turntable repair requests in recent years. "That's been a real growth industry."

Some stuff - the DVD players and the likes - is often not worth fixing, Skinner says. He talks of the "planned obsolescence" of some of the equipment that is sold now.

"It's not like some European countries where things are made to be recycled; here they throw everything in the tip." He'll still fix transistor radios. "We can't get parts any more, so we use second-hand parts - and we tell them." And his own house is full of equipment he has revived.

That includes a television - the greatest electronic invention, he says (although he doesn't watch a lot of it).

In the beginning, 39 Sandringham Rd was a condom factory. That was in the 1920s. Then it manufactured soft drinks, and after the war it became an ink factory. Next it became an industrial photographer's premises. When Skinner moved in, "It was like a rabbits' warren, lots of little dark rooms".

He says they've knocked down some walls since, but the building is still very much compartmentalised and true to its original state.

There's the aerials room, the computer room, the plugs and PC mount room. There are televisions everywhere in every state of undress, cables and electronic guts galore. Dead carcasses of videos and monitors and boom boxes abound.

It is a visitor's maze of an eyesore and a small boy's delight and a place of many treasures where everything has its place. Skinner goes to a room cluttered with gadgetry and paper work. "This is my office. It looks like chaos, but I seem to work it out."

On the wall downstairs is a letter from a member of the 20 per cent - the older customers - who seek treatment for their ailing wares. It comes from Mrs E. Wiley from faraway Papatoetoe and it is written with the floral hand of the aged. This is what it says:

Dear Mr Skinner,

Many thanks to you for fixing our PYE radio for me.

The reason I thought it was a coil, is, I took it late last year to [another company], who rang & said it was a coil, as it was so old, no parts available!!
So leads me to think that it hadn't been looked at, at all, after you finding no fault, except for earthy wire etc.

So once again, my thanks to you for such kind service, & lovely to have it going again. Will recommend you to folk in future.

I remain, Mrs E. Wiley

If Skinner sells up now, he will redeem what he sees as his superannuation scheme. He says the site is ripe for the completion of, say, a tidy apartment complex with maybe a cafe and a bar that will, from the third floor, give unfettered views across Sandringham Rd before the Rugby World Cup kick-off.

He thinks he might like to play a bit more golf. He's got a 19 handicap. "Six would be good, but I'm no spring chicken." And he thinks he might like to start up his business, on a smaller scale, elsewhere.

"I'm probably the oldest in the country doing it. We haven't trained an apprentice for years. I would sell the business [as a going concern] if I could sell it to the right person, but the right person would have to meet my criteria of fixing stuff."

It's an active job, he says - and he still wants something to do. "I can't play golf every day, or fish every day. I could get a smaller place and carry on until I've had enough.

So much is disposable these throw-away days. A tour of these premises is to be privy to the beauty of the past in its most chaotic - and restorative - form.

Telefix, like its owner, is not succumbing to any planned obsolescence.