For over a year now we have been talking about how Bridge Analyzers is focused on “Care over Time.” Whether it comes to building new Exhaust Gas Analyzers for our motorcycle customers or servicing Modified Atmosphere Packaging Gas Analyzers for our food industry customers, our focus is providing our customers with consistent “Care over Time.” “Care over Time” has become our internal mantra as well as a mission statement we want our clients to truly understand. As we have continued to think about this as one of our guiding principles and goals, we were reminded of one of our favorite books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The main theme of the book circles around a constant discussion of quality and care, and how they affect how we care for people and things, as well as how we orient ourselves in the world and act in it.
Last year when we came up with the “Care over Time” message, we didn’t even think about Robert Pirsig’s classic book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but the connection between that book, our customer service philosophy, and the fact that many of our best customers are some of the top motorcycle companies in the world seems to be less and less a coincidence as time goes on.
For us care and quality are two sides of the same coin. This is equally true when it comes to new production or maintenance. We know that we can only build a quality product if we make a concerted effort to care about both the product itself and the customer who will be using it every day. At Bridge Analyzers, every time we build or service any of our gas analyzers, we do it with care. We build and maintain our customers’ analyzers with care because we are committed to continually delivering a quality product and a quality experience to them. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig expounds on the idea of quality and care being inextricably linked to one another when he writes,
There has been a haze, a backup problem in this discussion so far; I talked about caring the first day and then realized I couldn’t say anything meaningful about caring until its inverse side, Quality, is understood. I think it’s important now to tie care to Quality by pointing out that care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristics of Quality.
For Pirsig quality and care are the basis of his philosophy as well as his book, and while motorcycling and motorcycle maintenance are the ostensible focal points of the book, in reality they are merely the analogy through which he makes his argument for his deeper discussion of how to live a life imbued with quality and care. Pirsig’s notions of quality and care are innately tied to his conception of work— both what it is normally and what it could become if we had a better understanding of how quality and care effect the work we do, the way we do it, and the intent with which we do it.
Zen Buddhists talk about “just sitting,” a meditative practice in which the idea of a duality of self and object does not dominate one’s consciousness. What I’m talking about here in motorcycle maintenance is “just fixing,” in which the idea of a duality of self and object doesn’t dominate one’s consciousness. When one isn’t dominated by feelings of separateness from what he’s working on, then one can be said to “care” about what he’s doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one’s doing. When one has this feeling then he also sees the inverse side of caring, Quality itself.
At Bridge Analyzers we are committed to providing our customers with the highest quality Exhaust Gas Analyzers and MAP Gas Analyzers available on the market, as well as the most responsive customer service in the industry.
To experience our commitment to Quality and “Care over Time” contact us today. We would love to help you.
Photos courtesy of Shobba, Tricycle, and The New York Times