Originally Posted by
nontraveller
I agree with you, I guess the fact that concerns me more is that they didn't notice a 6-hour worth of fixing (since the desk lady announced at some point that the aircraft had some failures, which most people understood as failure other than the windshield wiper - I don't really remember what she said, but it was clear to me that there were other issues).
There may not have been anything to notice until the windshield wiper failed. The pilot may have reported that the windshield wiper had failed (and, indeed, that was probably the symptom he saw), but the root cause of the failure might've been something more "interesting" (e.g. widespread electrical issues). In that case, stopping to fix the "minor" problem of the wiper may have been a good thing.
And modern commercial aircraft are designed with a wide variety of redundant systems; even if the failure hadn't been noticed before takeoff, you likely would've been just fine in transit.