It’s all relative…
In news coverage of the aftermath of the great Hawaii earthquake of mid-October 2006, the Governor of the State spoke on CBC-TV Newsworld to explain why he called for a declaration of a state of emergency. In quick order, he mentioned:
- It was going to take “most of the morning” to get things back to normal;
- They lost internet connectivity and were only just beginning to get it back after a whole day without it;
- Some 3,000 tourists still had not yet been cleared to return to their hotels.
Asked about injuries resulting from the quake, he said that not all the reports were in yet but, so far, they had one broken arm reported and, when that was confirmed, it would be the worst of the injuries reported so far.
All I could wonder was what must the people of New Orleans be thinking when they hear what prompts the declaration of a state of emergency on the Big Island of Hawaii.
(I also thought that it sort of parallels the now-infamous day in this country in mid-January 1999 when then Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman felt compelled to call out the Canadian Army to help his city deal with several days’ accumulated snowfall of some 100 cm overall that effectively paralyzed everything for a day at one point in the run of bad weather.)
= = =
A soundtrack disappointment to share…
Recently we (we being the immediate family) watched a movie that it turned out I liked a lot more than I thought I was going to – “50 First Dates”, with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore, that proved to be an occasionally touching little romantic comedy.
One of the reasons I liked it was its music and three songs in particular really stood out for me – a nice piece of Bob Marley reggae called “Pressure Drop” (Coincidentally the same song by a different band, The Specials, figures in another movie soundtrack I like a lot – the music that backs up “Gross Pointe Blank”); there is also a wonderful interpretation of the Wizard of Oz’s signature piece – “Over the Rainbow” – that is backed up by the most unlikely of instruments, a ukulele. And because it occurs in at least two of the movie’s turning points, I really liked the way they used the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t it be nice?”.
Not one of which, it turns out, is on the CD of songs from the movie.
Apparently, I’m not alone in my disappointment with these omissions. Here’s one rail from the “Was this review helpful to you?” order desk of Amazon.ca:
“hmmm.....i dont know HOW they missed out on Iz's song....hes known and loved throughout Hawaii. i think its a bit of a slap in the face to be missing this one....he is, i think, the greatest Hawaiian singer of all time...and come on! His song is playing during their wedding! Also missing the Beach Boys, 311 and of course: BOB MARLEY! Its a sad soundtrack....i won't go out and buy it but im sure the songs on the cd are good, its just not worth the money because its not complete”
The “Iz” in the foregoing is a reference to the artist who sings the gorgeous Island take on “Over the Rainbow”. After a couple e-mail exchanges with a Baby Duck regular, I received a copy of a message he got from his son, who informed us that he is also a big fan of the artist (and it’s a good thing because I doubt I ever would have come up with, “It’s Israel ‘Izzy’ Kamakawiwo'ole... beautiful.” in any Google search that I might have triggered!) Iz died in 1997 – way too young at age 38, but it was hardly surprising when you read this note on a tribute page: “Throughout his career, Iz also had a weight problem that plagued his 6-foot-2-inch frame. At one time he tipped the scales at 757 pounds, and vowed in 1995 to shed 360 pounds. At one point during his career, he required a forklift to get on stage.”
The full tribute, with some somewhat frightening pictures, appears here.
And without too much trouble, you can also Google up an online link to Iz’s lovely take on “Over the Rainbow”. Worth the search; and it’s just too bad it – and Bob Marley’s “Pressure Drop”, and “Wouldn’t it be nice?” – got bumped by a couple of the 80s cheese dips they included on the movie’s “soundtrack”.
= = =
Here’s a bit of spin to forever re-define “spin”. If you’re in the Florida Congressional District that is home to disgraced Washington page-chaser Mark Foley, well take heart, the Republican Party feels your pain. In fact, they’re urging voters to reject the pedophile by voting for him. It actually makes its own perverted sense once you read why, and I could try to explain it. But why bother when Florida author Carl Hiaasen, who has written some hilarious novels of his own about corrupt South Florida politicians, does it so much better in a recent Miami Herald column? (online edition, October 22 / 06):
GOP's logic: To reject Foley, vote for him
By CARL HIAASEN
If you think you've got problems, imagine what it's like to be Joe Negron.
The good news: You finally get to run for Congress.
The bad news: Your name won't be on the ballot.
The really bad news: Mark Foley's name will be.
Negron is a Republican state legislator from Stuart. He was chosen to run for Foley's seat in Florida's 16th congressional district after Foley resigned suddenly last month.
The move came so late that the ballots couldn't be updated. And last week, in a blow to the GOP, a judge ruled that election officials cannot post notices at polls to explain that a vote for Mark Foley is actually a vote for Joe Negron.
Given the heated publicity surrounding the scandal, only a cave dweller wouldn't already be aware that Foley has quit the race and has been replaced by another candidate -- Negron.
But this is South Florida, where several thousand folks mistakenly voted for screamer Pat Buchanan back in 2000 and threw the presidential election into epic turmoil. This time around, it's the Democrats who stand to benefit from voter confusion, and the Republicans are frantic with worry. That's why they suggested helpful, prominently displayed notices bearing Negron's name.
When Leon County Circuit Judge Janet Ferris ruled against the on-site notices, Democratic contender Tim Mahoney cheered the decision, saying it preserved ''the sanctity of the ballot box.''
It also preserved the convenient invisibility of Joe Negron. Mahoney probably wouldn't be riven with dismay if some voters who saw Foley's name on the ballot assumed that the ex-congressman was still in the race.
The 16th district, which includes parts of Palm Beach and eight other counties, is heavily Republican and conservative. Normally that would bode well for Negron, but Foley's antics were sufficiently reprehensible to deflate some rank-and-file enthusiasm.
Salacious e-messages
Had Foley merely been caught taking bribes, like his crooked colleague from Ohio, Bob Ney, the challenge facing Negron wouldn't be so daunting. However, Foley's salacious electronic messages to teenage House pages set a new subterranean standard of sleaze that offended virtually every core constituency.
It's so bad that Florida's top Republicans are loath to do what the ballot plainly does – mention Foley by name. You can't blame Negron for wanting a printed explanation of his weird predicament tacked up at all the polling places.
State Republicans, prodded by Gov. Jeb Bush, intend to appeal Judge Ferris' ruling that barred the posting of such notices. They say it's unfair to their candidate -- an amusing argument from the same people who blocked Al Gore from getting a statewide recount in his presidential contest with the governor's brother six years ago.
The proper spin
If the court's decision in the Negron case is overturned, the GOP should pull out all the literary stops with their election-day 'educational' signage. Leave nothing to chance:
Notice to All Registered Voters of the 16th Congressional District:
This is to remind you that a vote for that degenerate mollusk, Mark Foley, is really a vote for that upstanding family guy, Joe Negron!
Joe sincerely wishes his name were on the ballot instead of Mark Foley's. It certainly would make your task easier, and ours, too. And even though it might be distasteful -- even nauseating – to cast a vote for the disgraced former congressman, you can be confident that your vote won't be wasted.
Each and every one will be counted for Joe Negron, who is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING like Mark Foley, we swear to God.
For example, Joe Negron has never gone skinny dipping with a priest. Or even with a rabbi, for that matter. He has never flirted with teenagers on the Internet, or engaged in raunchy online sex while voting on an important appropriations bill.
Please don't punish Joe Negron just because his name isn't on your ballot. It would have been there, if only Mark Foley had been caught earlier.
That would have happened had the House Republican leadership not looked the other way, but that also isn't Joe Negron's fault. He is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING like Dennis Hastert, we swear to God.
Look at it this way: A vote for Mark Foley is really a vote against Mark Foley and the morally bankrupt system that allowed him to run wild for all those years.
Send a strong message to Washington by electing Joe Negron to Congress. Vote for Mark Foley on Nov. 7.
See? With the proper spin, it's really not so confusing.”
US Republican politics: what goes around, comes around.
= = =
And finally…
I’ve been a big fan of Steve Earle’s music for a long time and so was delighted to discover that the ongoing Eagle Rock Entertainment’s “Live at Montreux”* series now includes a 66-minute long set of his 2005 Montreux appearance.
* (Everything here subtitled “Live at Montreux” is part of the series.
Now if you are someone whose Earle lust is sated only by the thundering rock of tunes like “Copperhead Road”, or the bluegrass-heavy full-band music that you’ll hear on the albums he’s released in company with the likes of the Del McCoury Band, you might want to give this a miss, because what you get here is Steve, his acoustic guitar (which he swaps for one song for a mandolin), and his harmonica. Even his rendition of “Copperhead Road” is acoustic here.
What you also get on this Eagle Rock release is his trademark voice, and his reduction of the alphabet to a couple vowels and about six or eight consonants that he rolls over top of each other at the end of each line and the beginning of the next. And of course you get his politics. Steve Earle is a passionate opponent of the Bush White House and the depths to which it has dragged the “America” that he (Earle) so obviously cares about. (In fact, at the beginning of this Montreux concert, he is introduced by a Charles Aznavour clone as “the Michael Moore of the music set”.)
One of my favourite songs of his, “Dixieland”, is written as though it comes from the mouth of a US Civil War-era soldier named Kilrain, in the Union Army’s 20th Maine regiment. Civil War-o-philes can be forgiven for thinking Kilrain was an actual figure from history. The 20th Maine, after all, really existed and performed heroically at Gettysburg. Kilrain, meanwhile, figures prominently in the Michael Shaara novel, “The Killer Angels”, about the Battle of Gettysburg, and not surprisingly in the movie, “Gettysburg”, which pretty well takes its storyboards from Shaara’s book. But although he personally is fictional, Kilrain is very much based on historically real people – the Irish who fought for the Union in that War. (And even when you’re new to reading about the Civil War, it won’t be long before you’ve encountered The Irish Brigade, fearless and sadly renowned for the unbelievably high casualties they sustained at three major Civil War battles – Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg.)
More here.
On the surface, “Dixieland” is about Kilrain fighting for his commander, Colonel Joshua Chamberlain. But then you hit the line:
“I am Kilrain of the 20th Maine and I damn all gentlemen
Whose only worth is their father's name and the sweat of a workin' man.”
(Anyone know of another such American “gentleman” placed perhaps in a more recent historical context?) Whoops! Suddenly you realize you’re listening not to a lively celebration of a fighting Irishman, but rather to a protest song. As Earle succinctly puts it after briefly reviewing some of the causes of the Civil War, when you boil it all down, it was all about money and it was one more in the endless series of class wars that threw the poor into the front lines to fight for the interests of the rich.
And so the following line then becomes less a statement of pride than a fervent wish, or a prayer, or perhaps even a bitterly sarcastic, “Oh sure, in your dreams!”:
“Well we come from the farms and the city streets and a hundred foreign lands.
And we spilled our blood in the battle's heat;
Now we're all Americans.”
Until next time.
Thursday, October 05, 2006
If the world’s developed countries soon plunge into a major recession, it’ll because of crap like this:
A few days ago, we received a voicemail from the fearsomely named “Home Depot Consumer Credit Relations Department”. Please call us back on an urgent matter, said the message.
I already knew what it was about. A few weeks previous, a quartet of bills to pay had turned up on my desk in a pile that had been unexplored for some time. (I’d offer, “You have to see my desk”, by way of explanation but trust me, you really don’t want to do that.) Anyway, one of these was a Home Depot bill and because I’d let it languish, we had missed the “Minimum payment due by” date. (We had just sent off payment in full but, obviously, they called before they received it.)
Now I have (actually “had”; read on) a credit limit at Home Depot of $500. I only have a Home Depot card because one day when we were at the store wheeling some $350 worth of stuff through the cash they had a special promotion that took 10% off your purchase if you applied on the spot for a Home Depot credit card. $35 is nothing to sneeze at, so we went for it and were told our credit limit would be $500.
So, in response to the call, I phoned the credit relations folks and advised them of the mix-up on our part – even apologizing for same. Plus I gave them the news that payment – in full – was on its way, if it hadn’t already been received. No problem, said the cheery phone worker, who thanked me and went on his way to harass the next deadbeat on his list.
The very next day… The. Very. Next. Day. I opened a letter from Home Depot to read a 36-point bold headline: “Congratulations [My name here], your credit limit has been increased to $9,000!” (The exclamation point is, in fact, theirs.)
That’s less than 24 hours after they had conveyed to me their concern about my apparent inability to meet the previous month’s demand for a minimum monthly payment. (And obviously their letter had to have been written and mailed even before then.) A 17-fold increase in my credit limit!
Never one to resist the opportunity for a little snarking, I immediately sent a letter to the Credit Relations Department telling them that, in view of their obvious worry about my apparent inability to meet the minimum monthly payment on a credit line with a $500 ceiling, I simply could not bring myself to accept risking their even greater trauma were I to repeat the oversight on an account with a limit 17 times greater. I ended by requesting an immediate reduction of the increase in my limit to a total of $1,000.
There is a serious, more practical side to this. A friend not so long ago has his wallet stolen and, within hours, the thief had tried to use one of his stolen credit cards in an attempt to purchase a big-screen television at a local Best-Buy. (The would-be home theatre builder had also run out the door when told the card needed to be checked, and made his escape. But he bolted from the parking lot in a van painted in large letters with the name of the company he worked for; apparently it was the only vehicle he could get his hands on that was large enough to cart off a big-screen TV. He is now awaiting sentencing. He is also a complete idiot who deserves pride of place on an upcoming Jay Leno “Stupid Criminals” Headlines segment. But I digress.)
Even when you’re the victim of credit-card fraud, the hoops you have to jump through to undo it are enormously time-consuming. By fixing lower limits on your store cards, you can reduce their attraction to thieves who swiftly find out that risking arrest for no more than the ability to purchase a standard home computer just isn’t worth it.
But what really bugs me about Home Depot’s congratulatory message is not only the simple fact of the massive increase in credit from $500 to $9,000 (???? What in hell do they think we earn to suggest that running up an amount like that in just one store’s credit line is something we can do?), it is also the fact that it was entirely unsolicited. It’s not like I suddenly decided I wanted to build a new wing on the family mansion and requested a credit line that would comfortably pay for the building materials after a mere half-dozen or so maximum limit purchases. It’s not even like we recently wanted to buy on credit something whose price exceeded our credit ceiling.
And despite being once more in the happy position of having cleared off our account in full, I nonetheless have no doubt whatsoever that we are now red-flagged in their file with a code that reflects a missed minimum payment. Yet still they responded by gratuitously whacking our limit up by 17 times its original ceiling.
So if you’re chatting over the family dinner table one evening about why global credit card interest is so high (it could happen), it seems it’s my fault.
Sorry about that.
- - -
Apparently I am the first person on the face of the earth to have ordered a CanWood Erika 2 loft / bunk bed ladder and side rail kit without actually having purchased the bed itself.
And thereby, you will not be surprised to hear, hangs a tale.
Several weeks ago, I built a combination loft bed / computer desk in a downstairs space that eventually will become offspring’s bedroom if everything works out. The size of the room is such that the length of the elevated bed spans the width of the room, which enables its head and foot to rest on wall-anchored ledger boards. However, that span is also just shy of ten feet long, considerably longer than standard bed kits (with the possible exception of those intended for sale in markets frequented by Africa’s Masai tribe).
And while I could have built an angled ladder and added home-made side rails, since both would be accent touches I thought why not find some product already nicely finished? By professionals, trained in the art of slathering on four coats of satin urethane. And the Erika 2 bed, it turns out, is not only a beautifully finished product overall, its ladder and side rails are available for separate purchase for a laughably reasonable price less than the cost of the materials alone that I would have had to buy, never mind the dollar value of my time to cut, sand, assemble and finish them. So I went to Sears to see what one looked like in its assembled state, and was more than happy. By a most serendipitous coincidence, its height was almost exactly suited to my home-built bed frame. (If you’d appreciate a visual distraction at this moment, here is the Erika 2 in loft bed / computer desk configuration, as Sears sells it. The assembled ladder and side rail kit is visible in the photo as, well, a ladder and side rails.):
After waiting several weeks, I finally received word from Sears that the kit had arrived. It came in a tightly packed box roughly the same dimensions as a small diving board. When I opened it, however, I also noticed immediately that it included a blister pack stuffed with an astonishing array of bolts, nuts, and completely mysterious threaded little things whose collective purpose defied my best guess. No matter, I concluded, all this will be made clear by the… instructions?
After I emptied the box of its beautifully finished wood, hardware bag and packing fillers, all that remained was a single sheet of paper that featured a sketch of the finished ladder and side rails, with the caption, “For assembly instructions, refer to the appropriate page in the instructions for assembling the Erika 2 loft or bunk bed”.
In other words, Sears plainly has assumed that no one would ever order only the ladder and side rails without having ordered the entire bed kit, and quite possibly the matching dresser, toy box and various other elements of the Erika 2 line.
Anyway, to end your pain, I will tell you that you will be delighted, as I was, to hear that CanWood – a company based in Penticton, British Columbia – has come through. When I finally got to speak to a real person after unsuccessful e-efforts to contact them, she regretfully informed me that they had no electronic version of the required instructions, but she would be only to happy to photocopy and mail the relevant section of the entire package of Erika 2 instructions (which, it turns out, is a book).
That evening, I interrupted our family dinner conversation about why global credit card interest rates are so high and quietly muttered about what I said was the stupidity of selling a separate component without providing separate assembly instructions. I suggested one possible alternative might be to include the full instructions with the ladder and side rail kit. To me, it was obvious from their omitting the instructions in the ladder kit's packaging that almost everyone orders the entire bunk or loft bed package. But by putting the instructions in the ladder / side rail kit box, CanWood would ensure that buyers of the full Erika 2 package also have what they need – requiring them only to open the ladder / side rails kit box. And those of us (so far, just me, I guess) who purchase it alone would also have the assembly guide.
My daughter, who plainly has a tolerance level she sure didn’t get from me, then asked, “But what about people who only want to buy the bed kit and not the ladder kit? Maybe they’re replacing a damaged bed and are perfectly happy with the ladder and rails they already have.” So dinner promptly became a discussion about which was the likelier outcome.
I lost. You’ll find that verdict in the Complete Dad Instruction Manual under “So what else is new?”
- - -
And finally, here’s a sort of re-assuring note for all of us “For Better or For Worse” fans. It turns out that Grandpa Jim didn’t die in the recent strip where he was found comatose at the nursing home. Nope. He just had a severe stroke that, at this writing, has utterly incapacitated him. So don’t… um, worry. It looks like a funeral, if it is in the cards, won’t be dealt to us readers for some time to come. In the meantime, we can smack the breakfast table with side-splitting mirth and hilarity as the family comes together to grapple with the sudden imposition of an unconscious and unresponsive father / husband / grandfather into their lives. Relevant? Well sure. This, after all, is happening ever more often these days to many families in this age of longer lives and more and more older baby-boomers’ succumbing belatedly to the combined effects of a couple decades’ worth of narcotic and hallucinogenic experimentation that began in the 1960s, since amplified by expanding family budgets that allow for the regular ingestion of really fine single-malt scotch, tequila and fine wines. Some of us, I fear, are well down the road to a single-digit brain-cell inventory. I can almost just about (OK, maybe not) hardly wait until the strip goes for the real knee-slapper series when the whole family has an hilarious prolonged debate over whether to take Grandpa Jim off life support. For Better or For Worse. Putting the “Augh!” in laugh.
Until next time…
A few days ago, we received a voicemail from the fearsomely named “Home Depot Consumer Credit Relations Department”. Please call us back on an urgent matter, said the message.
I already knew what it was about. A few weeks previous, a quartet of bills to pay had turned up on my desk in a pile that had been unexplored for some time. (I’d offer, “You have to see my desk”, by way of explanation but trust me, you really don’t want to do that.) Anyway, one of these was a Home Depot bill and because I’d let it languish, we had missed the “Minimum payment due by” date. (We had just sent off payment in full but, obviously, they called before they received it.)
Now I have (actually “had”; read on) a credit limit at Home Depot of $500. I only have a Home Depot card because one day when we were at the store wheeling some $350 worth of stuff through the cash they had a special promotion that took 10% off your purchase if you applied on the spot for a Home Depot credit card. $35 is nothing to sneeze at, so we went for it and were told our credit limit would be $500.
So, in response to the call, I phoned the credit relations folks and advised them of the mix-up on our part – even apologizing for same. Plus I gave them the news that payment – in full – was on its way, if it hadn’t already been received. No problem, said the cheery phone worker, who thanked me and went on his way to harass the next deadbeat on his list.
The very next day… The. Very. Next. Day. I opened a letter from Home Depot to read a 36-point bold headline: “Congratulations [My name here], your credit limit has been increased to $9,000!” (The exclamation point is, in fact, theirs.)
That’s less than 24 hours after they had conveyed to me their concern about my apparent inability to meet the previous month’s demand for a minimum monthly payment. (And obviously their letter had to have been written and mailed even before then.) A 17-fold increase in my credit limit!
Never one to resist the opportunity for a little snarking, I immediately sent a letter to the Credit Relations Department telling them that, in view of their obvious worry about my apparent inability to meet the minimum monthly payment on a credit line with a $500 ceiling, I simply could not bring myself to accept risking their even greater trauma were I to repeat the oversight on an account with a limit 17 times greater. I ended by requesting an immediate reduction of the increase in my limit to a total of $1,000.
There is a serious, more practical side to this. A friend not so long ago has his wallet stolen and, within hours, the thief had tried to use one of his stolen credit cards in an attempt to purchase a big-screen television at a local Best-Buy. (The would-be home theatre builder had also run out the door when told the card needed to be checked, and made his escape. But he bolted from the parking lot in a van painted in large letters with the name of the company he worked for; apparently it was the only vehicle he could get his hands on that was large enough to cart off a big-screen TV. He is now awaiting sentencing. He is also a complete idiot who deserves pride of place on an upcoming Jay Leno “Stupid Criminals” Headlines segment. But I digress.)
Even when you’re the victim of credit-card fraud, the hoops you have to jump through to undo it are enormously time-consuming. By fixing lower limits on your store cards, you can reduce their attraction to thieves who swiftly find out that risking arrest for no more than the ability to purchase a standard home computer just isn’t worth it.
But what really bugs me about Home Depot’s congratulatory message is not only the simple fact of the massive increase in credit from $500 to $9,000 (???? What in hell do they think we earn to suggest that running up an amount like that in just one store’s credit line is something we can do?), it is also the fact that it was entirely unsolicited. It’s not like I suddenly decided I wanted to build a new wing on the family mansion and requested a credit line that would comfortably pay for the building materials after a mere half-dozen or so maximum limit purchases. It’s not even like we recently wanted to buy on credit something whose price exceeded our credit ceiling.
And despite being once more in the happy position of having cleared off our account in full, I nonetheless have no doubt whatsoever that we are now red-flagged in their file with a code that reflects a missed minimum payment. Yet still they responded by gratuitously whacking our limit up by 17 times its original ceiling.
So if you’re chatting over the family dinner table one evening about why global credit card interest is so high (it could happen), it seems it’s my fault.
Sorry about that.
- - -
Apparently I am the first person on the face of the earth to have ordered a CanWood Erika 2 loft / bunk bed ladder and side rail kit without actually having purchased the bed itself.
And thereby, you will not be surprised to hear, hangs a tale.
Several weeks ago, I built a combination loft bed / computer desk in a downstairs space that eventually will become offspring’s bedroom if everything works out. The size of the room is such that the length of the elevated bed spans the width of the room, which enables its head and foot to rest on wall-anchored ledger boards. However, that span is also just shy of ten feet long, considerably longer than standard bed kits (with the possible exception of those intended for sale in markets frequented by Africa’s Masai tribe).
And while I could have built an angled ladder and added home-made side rails, since both would be accent touches I thought why not find some product already nicely finished? By professionals, trained in the art of slathering on four coats of satin urethane. And the Erika 2 bed, it turns out, is not only a beautifully finished product overall, its ladder and side rails are available for separate purchase for a laughably reasonable price less than the cost of the materials alone that I would have had to buy, never mind the dollar value of my time to cut, sand, assemble and finish them. So I went to Sears to see what one looked like in its assembled state, and was more than happy. By a most serendipitous coincidence, its height was almost exactly suited to my home-built bed frame. (If you’d appreciate a visual distraction at this moment, here is the Erika 2 in loft bed / computer desk configuration, as Sears sells it. The assembled ladder and side rail kit is visible in the photo as, well, a ladder and side rails.):
After waiting several weeks, I finally received word from Sears that the kit had arrived. It came in a tightly packed box roughly the same dimensions as a small diving board. When I opened it, however, I also noticed immediately that it included a blister pack stuffed with an astonishing array of bolts, nuts, and completely mysterious threaded little things whose collective purpose defied my best guess. No matter, I concluded, all this will be made clear by the… instructions?
After I emptied the box of its beautifully finished wood, hardware bag and packing fillers, all that remained was a single sheet of paper that featured a sketch of the finished ladder and side rails, with the caption, “For assembly instructions, refer to the appropriate page in the instructions for assembling the Erika 2 loft or bunk bed”.
In other words, Sears plainly has assumed that no one would ever order only the ladder and side rails without having ordered the entire bed kit, and quite possibly the matching dresser, toy box and various other elements of the Erika 2 line.
Anyway, to end your pain, I will tell you that you will be delighted, as I was, to hear that CanWood – a company based in Penticton, British Columbia – has come through. When I finally got to speak to a real person after unsuccessful e-efforts to contact them, she regretfully informed me that they had no electronic version of the required instructions, but she would be only to happy to photocopy and mail the relevant section of the entire package of Erika 2 instructions (which, it turns out, is a book).
That evening, I interrupted our family dinner conversation about why global credit card interest rates are so high and quietly muttered about what I said was the stupidity of selling a separate component without providing separate assembly instructions. I suggested one possible alternative might be to include the full instructions with the ladder and side rail kit. To me, it was obvious from their omitting the instructions in the ladder kit's packaging that almost everyone orders the entire bunk or loft bed package. But by putting the instructions in the ladder / side rail kit box, CanWood would ensure that buyers of the full Erika 2 package also have what they need – requiring them only to open the ladder / side rails kit box. And those of us (so far, just me, I guess) who purchase it alone would also have the assembly guide.
My daughter, who plainly has a tolerance level she sure didn’t get from me, then asked, “But what about people who only want to buy the bed kit and not the ladder kit? Maybe they’re replacing a damaged bed and are perfectly happy with the ladder and rails they already have.” So dinner promptly became a discussion about which was the likelier outcome.
I lost. You’ll find that verdict in the Complete Dad Instruction Manual under “So what else is new?”
- - -
And finally, here’s a sort of re-assuring note for all of us “For Better or For Worse” fans. It turns out that Grandpa Jim didn’t die in the recent strip where he was found comatose at the nursing home. Nope. He just had a severe stroke that, at this writing, has utterly incapacitated him. So don’t… um, worry. It looks like a funeral, if it is in the cards, won’t be dealt to us readers for some time to come. In the meantime, we can smack the breakfast table with side-splitting mirth and hilarity as the family comes together to grapple with the sudden imposition of an unconscious and unresponsive father / husband / grandfather into their lives. Relevant? Well sure. This, after all, is happening ever more often these days to many families in this age of longer lives and more and more older baby-boomers’ succumbing belatedly to the combined effects of a couple decades’ worth of narcotic and hallucinogenic experimentation that began in the 1960s, since amplified by expanding family budgets that allow for the regular ingestion of really fine single-malt scotch, tequila and fine wines. Some of us, I fear, are well down the road to a single-digit brain-cell inventory. I can almost just about (OK, maybe not) hardly wait until the strip goes for the real knee-slapper series when the whole family has an hilarious prolonged debate over whether to take Grandpa Jim off life support. For Better or For Worse. Putting the “Augh!” in laugh.
Until next time…
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