By Jim Hagarty
1987
As dreams go, the American one isn’t bad. There are worse things to want than clothes, cars and colour TVs. A crowd of people pushing and shoving their way into a big department store sale is a happier sight than a throng of angry protesters burning flags and effigies and vowing death and destruction to imperialist dogs, capitalist pigs and other such warmongering wretches.
But the dream can get a little nightmarish, at times. The problem is not so much in collecting up most of the things that catch your eye as you flip through the catalogues on the couch at night but in keeping your precious belongings working after you get them.
At my place, while I’m running around the property and up and down ladders trying to fix up one half of the things I own, the rest of my possessions are sitting around in the house, garage and driveway breaking down.
The first day I struck off down the lawn with my new self-propelled Klip King lawnmower, the right drive wheel quit working, causing the machine – and me – to run in circles.
I parked my new Sonic Speedster bicycle outside the restaurant and went in for a coffee. Seconds later, a blast not unlike that from a shotgun rocked the cups and saucers on the counter. I went outside to find my back tire had blown right off the rim.
A few weeks ago, I was cleaning the lenses of my new Roberto Fettucini eyeglasses when the frame fell apart in my hands.
One morning not long after my new Slumber Wonder bed was delivered, I woke up suffering from a definite unnatural curvature of my spine. A steel bar designed to hold the box spring and mattress up had fallen out and was lying on the floor. I was almost there myself.
My new Super Soundwaves cassette deck tape recorder has more bells, whistles and blinking lights than a 747 jet and looks better in the dark than the milky way. It quit recording any kind of sound about two months ago.
Half the stations on my new Vista Vision TV set just stopped coming in one day. Repairmen have been at my house four times since the spring.
Every time I start up my new Arid Aire clothes dryer, it screeches like a cat with its tail in a door. A fingernail scratching across a blackboard is a delightful sound in comparison.
I got a new Water Wizard shower stall put in my house and it worked like a dream. However, the doors let more water through than the Hoover Dam in spring.
Earlier this summer, my relatively new Fitzenstartz sports car spent three weeks in the shop due to a cooling system problem. I myself had a problem cooling my system when presented with a repair bill of $500.
Two days after I got my vehicle back, while I was sitting at a four-way stop sign adding up my troubles, the front of a station wagon and the back of my newly repaired car did the collision thing. A mere $1,300 will put my car back into tip-top shape.
I took advantage of a magazine subscription offer to order a free portable radio with the magazine’s name on it. It came in the mail. I popped the appropriate batteries into it. It has yet to issue a sound.
I have an electric frying pan with one leg missing, a kitchen clock with hands that have indicated for the past three months that it is precisely 5:25, three wristwatches that have ticked their last, a tape recorder that eats tape, and an electric alarm clock that shuts off in the middle of the night.
One day, the strings pulled the bridge right off my guitar. In order to type a letter to the manufacturer, I would have had to manually rewind the ribbon on my typewriter.
In 1962, I took the first $28.99 I’d ever managed to accumulate, walked into an appliance store, and bought my way into the consumer game. I brought home a Channel Master portable transistor radio which to me, had to be the highest scientific achievement of mankind up to that time.
I still have it. The other night, I pulled it out of my desk drawer, stuck some batteries in it and turned it on. It chirped to life right away. But when I tightened the back on it with the screwdriver, I suddenly remembered a slight flaw it has always had.
For some reason, it only works if you leave the back off.
Now, who else but a dedicated consumer would keep a radio around that only works when it’s not put together?
