I think that it started with my Grandpa. When I was a little boy, my Grandpa was a tinkerer. He was into electronics, radios, gadgets. His house was a smorgasbord of electronic kits from RadioShack, the kind where you hooked wires together on little springs and made projects that would buzz, or blink, or even pick up the radio. I didn’t know anything about electronics at the time. I just knew how to hook up the projects from the instruction book and have the kit buzz at me.

It wasn’t a big deal. No one made a fuss when one of the grandkids made the kit do something. It was just there for us to tinker with, to experiment with. If some adult encouraged us or pushed us to work on the electronics kits we would have gone to play baseball. Today I know that there were transistors, resistors, capacitors, all of the components of electronics in those kits. I didn’t know what they were then. I just learned to tinker until things worked and later how to change things a little bit to make them work differently.

The other person that shaped me in a quiet way was my Father. Dad was an auto mechanic. He’s been fixing cars for going on forty years now. We all look up to our Dads when we’re little kids. Dad and I had our disagreements when I was a teenager, as you do. Through it all I knew my Father fixed things. Fixing things was a nobel pursuit.

People asked Dad his opinion on auto repair. He’d help them when he could. They’d describe a problem. He’d have a rough answer. He rarely had an exact answer, but he could steer people in the direction that could lead to a repair. He could suggest someone who could fix their problem for them. It was a constant background noise when I was growing up.

It was also why I saw less of my Dad growing up than I would have liked. He was tinkering on his own cars or helping other people tinker on theirs. Sometimes I was there with him. More often I wasn’t. Fixing cars didn’t appeal to me, not nearly as much as tinkering on computers.

Grandpa and Dad showed me that it is okay to take things apart, to inspect them and look for problems. It’s okay to try to fix things, even if you didn’t have much of an idea of how they work.

Miraculously, things started working if I took them apart and put them back together. That’s all it usually took with the early electronic gadgets of my youth. Take them apart, out of their case, jostle them around a bit. Get a look at the components, see nothing obviously wrong, and put them back together. Presto, they started working.

When people go around the room and introduce themselves in meetings most say what their job title is or describe their functional area. “I’m Dan. I’m on the Help Desk” or “I’m Laurie. I’m a Developer.” When the circle comes around to me, “I’m Gary. I fix things.” It sounds impenitent. Maybe it started that way but the longer I work in Information Technology the more right it feels.

Other people design solutions. I fix things. Other people improve processes. I fix things. Other people find synergies. I fix things. Show me something that is broken, be it a design, a process, or even (God help me) a synergy, and I’ll try to fix it. It’s almost a compulsion. I get agitated when I have to look at a broken thing that I know I can help with, and leave it broken. Maybe it’s not my problem to fix or there are other priorities. I have to leave the broken thing for a later day. A little part of me dies when I see something that I can fix and have to leave it broken.

There’s a lot of talk these days about “Maker Culture,” about people who create things and supporting those people in their endeavors. I look in my social media streams and can’t read more that a phone screen of entries before I bump up against some post about an entrepreneur, startup, or founder. It would probably help if I followed fewer entrepreneurs, startups, or founders.

It reminds me of how we used to venerate scientists. I’m old enough to remember the space program when it was about shooting men into space, not robots. In today’s startup culture we’re back to seeing creators as an aspirational goal.

We have less of a affinity for the engineers that make those creators ideas a reality. There’s not as much attention on “Fixer Culture.” That’s okay. Fixers make great things greater. We make good things gooder. We make broken things brokener. Wait. Hopefully not that last thing.

The “Fixers Journey” doesn’t flow in the Campbellian mold. We aren’t in the spotlight. We Keep Calm and Carry On. I suppose I’m a little jealous of the attention directed at the visionaries and the void afforded to those who keep the lights on.

It’s not a bad thing to be a Fixer. We are the Jack Ridley’s of the world, hack-sawing the broom handle so Chuck Yeager can go break the sound barrier. We do the things that let the great be great. There’s no shame in that, there’s no shame in keeping the lights on and the correct substances flowing through the correct pipes. We take the ideas that the Founders have and make them sustainable.

So the next time you’re inclined to introduce yourself as what you do, commit to that. Lay the bare truth on the table for other people to see. Expose them for thinking in constrained terms and corporate double speak. You Fix Things. You Make Dreams Happen. Even when those dreams are about synergies, God help you.