"Refurbuished"

The Seeker's jaw drops in astonishment. Scott Childers snickers to himself. How convenient was it that they landed in a place clearly labeled as a "TARDIS Repair Bay"?

Not as convenient as it first appeared. The TARDIS had a problem that is familiar to anybody trying to maintain aging equipment. When one is ready to repair the equipment, the original stock of key parts is gone. All the parts that are left are "refurbished", which is short for parts from someone else's returned equipment. Most of the components from the returns were probably OK, and so running some simple diagnostics to weed out the obviously broken parts and recycling the rest as replacement stock helps repair shops when there are no original parts left, or the few original parts left are prohibitively expensive.

There is a special category in the universe of parts - the part does not die, but fails in a way that cannot be detected, or fails intermittently. The TARDIS's chameleon circuit, the part that allows it to change its shape to blend into its surroundings, is a textbook example of such a part. And of course, the chameleon circuit to Scott's TARDIS is a refurb.

The external form of the TARDIS was appropriate to the location of the TARDIS it was salvaged from. That is, it looks like

1. the classic East Tennessee wooden outhouse, complete with a crescent cutout on the front door.
2. an ice cream truck.
3. the EVA pod in 2001: A Space Odyssey
4. the front of a cave, complete with two entrances.

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