We have a service economy, in part, because we no longer have servants. Carriage maintenance happened in the stables, amongst the grooms. Perhaps you even retained/owned a smith and a carpenter, so that if a wheel came off, Ben or Fetka would fix it right up. (We project ourselves onto the heroes and heroines of what we read, yet our ancestors are more likely to have been Ben and Fetka than Elizabeth Bennett or Pierre Bezukhov.) Now that we drive hybrids, and every man is the impresario of his own life, we require service. Our refractory items have to be taken to a service center, or a service man or woman must come to us, in person, by phone, or as an invisible, inaudible online manifestation.

The service economy begets the non-service economy — not agriculture or manufacturing or extraction, but those who offer service, yet do not provide it. They come in a uniform with a name stitched on the shirt pocket, or in distant Bangalore they ask our names, after the recording that tells us this conversation may be recorded for quality control, yet they do not serve us. The false servers cause a seepage of time, money, and equilibrium that looms large in our lives, though I do not know how it is scored in the GDP.

I am thinking of the servicing, not primarily of my computers — since I myself have mastered the solution to half of all computer problems (unplug it, wait a minute, then plug it back in), I seldom deal with computer geeks — but of the industrial-age artifacts, modernized, that still fill our kitchens, boiler rooms, and desktops.

Our land line in the country was on the fritz. We have a land line because cell-phone service is spotty, and we depend on it because our country computer can access the Internet only via dial-up (relying on 1995 technology turns you into Daniel Boone). But one fine day service became very not fine. Everyone seemed to be talking through steel pads. I could not read the Corner. The phone company sent a repairman, who examined the pole box down the driveway. His explanation was smooth, plausible, and incomprehensible. But the problem persisted. The second repairman had a different theory, and a ponytail. That is not relevant to his theory, but it made me think of eternal youth in American life. Some men (and women) can pull it off, but why should all of us try to look like the bands we liked in high school? The phone still didn’t work. Third time was the charm. The fault was the contractor’s, who at our request had run an underground line to the pole box, but used a line that was meant to be used only indoors, not in the dirt contending with deluges and frost heaves. (He used it, I have no doubt, because he had some lying around — a frequent recourse in the non-service economy.)

Sometimes the problem is far upstream. I have written about the broken valve on the back of my country stove, whose function is being performed by an old television antenna. I was about to say, “temporarily performed,” except our friend the antenna has been at work since before Christmas. Why has a new valve been as elusive as the health-care bill? We know that stagnant inventory lowers a company’s productivity (the dusty warehouse is the sign of death), so maybe no inventory at all means your business is super-productive. So, until the wretches in Hubei Province can fill another container ship with valves, I will go without.

So accustomed can we become to non-service that when service happens we feel blessed. My oven and stove top in the city were almost as old as I am. The oven had the size and appearance of a wall safe, the stove top was set in a linoleum frame. Finally they went to the great kitchen in the sky and had to be replaced. Twice during this process the gas leaked. A call to the local utility — I can see its Beaux Arts office tower out my window — brought repairmen. There was no nonsense about these guys; they were quick, knowledgeable, effective, and confident. “Don’t run until you see me running,” one of them assured us. “I’m not going to blow myself up.” If everything were potentially lethal, would we all be efficient?

But that is not the answer to the problem of the non-service economy either, as my boiler in the country showed. This piece of equipment is only as old as the millennium, and it kept the house going the winter the temperature went down to –27. So when it failed twice last month, we were even more surprised than we were incommoded. The fuel company sent two young men; one drove from as far as Pennsylvania. Their primary tool kits were pouches, fatter than laptops but smaller than briefcases. They found the problems (a broken circulator pump, a chewed wire), fixed them, and were gone in each case in less than half an hour. They bantered politely; one texted his wife, though he said later that they were to be married this summer (these days the ceremony follows the commitment). So Americans can still put things right without the threat of death.

There is a third, much rarer class of service, which is closer to art. My friend Doug is also an artist, and his skill at diagnosis and problem solving is creative. It was he who put the D handle on the antenna and made a valve. The artistry arises from focus and calm (if one thing does not work, try another). Given his ability to make almost anything happen, he has a degree of scorn for those who professionally make only one thing happen. Of the boiler repairmen, for instance, he said, “That’s all they do.”

But I had an answer for that. “David Paterson has been in politics all his life.”