Chapbook

[sasha]

It's fortunate you're mechanically inclined enough to navigate that territory with some conficence - I'm a mechanical idiot, an unrecontrucated klutz....

I've got an oil-fired forced hot air system, & until 2014 was running the same furnace since the house was built (1974, I think). For years, I nursed it along "for just one more season", until the exhaust pipe rusted through right next to the air inlet. The furnace was so old the parts weren't even manufactured any more. The tech said he "might be able to cobble something up", but now it was a safety issue, so I bit the bullet & replaced the furnace outright. A week later, I burned out my water pump (forgot that I even had a water filter, & had allowed it to silt up completely) - thousands in repairs - and a few weeks after that I lost my job - laid off. I felt like a CW song....

Fortunately, I was given 6-mo severance, which sustained me up to retirement age... I've been a free agent since....

[saw]

My house was built in 1920....so that furnace was actually 95 years old.....essentially from a time when things were built to last close to a century.....there are refrigerators in Baltimore running in people's basements built in the 40's......but capitalism could not survive if we kept building necessities to last "forever ".......I bought a brand new kitchen range in 1995. by 2001 it stopped working. A young college kid working part time for this appliance company came out. Since he didn't plan to make appliance repair a career, he came clean. He said the electronics in this model is built to fail, and it's so expensive to replace, you may as as well buy a newer model that's more expensive and will probably last longer....WTF ?

[sasha]

that's one of my newer rants - the linguistic shift of "customer service" from "how might we better serve our customers" to "how can we get our customers more compliant with our wishes?" They've got us by the balls and they know it, and they gleefully shake us down without an ounce of shame. "Don't like it? Take your business next door. They're even worse." I've already groused about the bland uniformity of product offerings - no more "just right", only "it'll do" (viewtopic.php?f=98&t=34270#p221117) but marketing has taken over as the dominant force in consumer sales. "Buy - or not, we don't care."

(in regard to the linked rant - I ended up buying a camera bag that looked ok online, but turned out to be a flimsy, cardboard piece of shit. My sister was able to sew a new strap onto my old Tamrac, so I'm back in business, and all it cost me was pint of her favorite ice cream as payment.)