Jasper Fleischhauer

Growing up in Germany provided me with a long list of electronic companions. Starting with a Discman, soon traded in for one of the first mp3-Players (128MB—32 songs!), growing up to 512MB and then my first Creative mp3-Player: The Creative Muvo2 with incredible 4GB. After countless repairs—usually just adhering the headphone jack to the motherboard with Tesa—it finally broke down after heavy rain.

Being so amazed by Creative’s quality, I had to replace it with a similar one—the Zen MicroPhoto. After getting it stolen way too quickly, I replaced it with a Zen Vision M (which I would give at least 5/10 on a repairability scale). My first one brought me through the A levels, my first job and traveled with me through New Zealand. After putting a crate of beer on it, I just bought a broken one off eBay and replaced my first cracked screen on an electronic device.

Getting hooked by the successful repair, I bought three other broken ones and built two working ones out of them, providing my brother and my then-girlfriend with the same device. Several iPods my friends had never stood a chance against this beast of a music player. Today, I still use that mp3-player model, even though I have a Fairphone 3 in my other pocket—my bigger trouble nowadays is finding working headphones, as most of them are connected via Bluetooth or have a volume control/microphone attached to the cable. Both options are too ‘State of the Art’ for my beloved historic device.

Ever since, when something stopped working I opened it up and tried fixing it. On my list so far are several CD players, washing machines, dishwashers, laptops, smartphones, and many other devices. Still, my best repair experience is fixing the Creative Muvo2 with Tesa tape every other month for several years.

After fixing my things for years, I was stoked to hear iFixit is coming to Europe/Germany. Early 2014, I was one of the first customers, and because of a bad job at the time, I was even looking for job offerings myself. After the hilarious 2014 April fools joke—stating Apple bought iFixit and with all Apple devices rated 10/10 repairability—but still, without any job offers, I sent an unsolicited application. As you can read this, you know it worked out well!

My timing played quite a big part in this though: iFixit Europe had just moved to a new office and was looking for new employees—but had no job offers already online—so I was the only applicant. I took what was offered and started working in customer support and translation. After a year, event organization was added and after two years I slowly shifted into website Q&A, working on UI/UX improvements. Finally, my media design degree paid off (at least a little bit). After another year, my transition was finished and since 2017 I split my time between event organization and … *drumroll* … SEO.