It's Not A Good Thing

I have never tried to hide the fact that I don't know much about car engines. I know where all the components are and have a rough idea of what they should do, but if something breaks I will have my car towed instead of trying to figure out how to fix the problem myself. The thing is that even if I was inspired to learn more about engines at this point I'm not sure I would be able to. Cars today have so many electronics components wired back to the engine that trying to fix a problem could actually create a whole crop of new ones. Today's car engines require people to be more electrician than mechanic. However, this technology overload is hardly exclusive to cars. It used to be that if something electronic was acting up you would unscrew the back of it, check if there were any loose wires (which were easy to find), solder the disconnected wire back to the right spot and the item would work again. Have you ever tried to repair an electronic component you bought in the last couple of years? Open it up and you may as well be staring at the human brain. Personally, I think this is being done intentionally to force people to go out and upgrade. At some point we all decide the cost of replacing something which is broken is worth the time we would save by not fighting to repair these malfunctioning items and I believe these companies are trying to push us to make that decision earlier. It makes good business sense and I understand why companies do it, I just wish they wouldn't also skimp on the product quality.

My parents have had a fake Christmas tree to go along with the real one for several years. Last year my father decided the old fake tree was too much of a pain to put up and wanted to get one of the ones which could be assembled in fewer steps. Never one to do their holiday decorating at half-speed, my parents went out and got a very nice Martha Stewart pre-lit tree which would go up in about five minutes. I was skeptical of the choice at first, but admit that once all the decorations were on it, the tree looked very nice. Everything went according to plan and the tree was taken down without incident. Fast forward to this year, when my father was expecting a similar experience. One small problem - one section of the tree would not light up. (Of course, it had to be the section which was pretty much just below eye level.) Now, the tree was supposed to come equipped with the kind of lights which would keep working even if one of the bulbs blew, but half the strand was dark. Even more frustrating, the rest of the strand would light, meaning there had to be a problem on the line. I checked the fuses in every section of the strand and they appeared to be working just fine. As near as I can tell, after one Christmas, the damn tree was just broken. Home Depot customer service was less than helpful (read: not at all) and wouldn't let my parents return it, which meant they were just going to have to work around the problem.

At first I suggested my father simply wrap another string of lights over the ones which had gone out, but he decided that would look sloppy and drive him nuts every time he looked at it. (I have to admit, if our positions were switched that would quietly annoy me as well. After all, I am my father's son.) So, my dad began to slowly pull the busted lights off the tree. Now, if this was a normal tree it would have taken 5 minutes. What my dad found out is that every single light was looped around the branch it was on and then secured to that branch with a plastic fastener. Also, because Martha Stewart is nothing if not thorough, every fourth or fifth light was zip-tied to the tree with the smallest green wire possible. So, not only did he have to unfasten every light (not easy with Rakauskas-sized hands), he had to gently cut these zip-ties without cutting the wire. I showed up when my father was about 30 lights in and was subsequently roped into helping with the rest, because "we have to be getting close to the end." As you may have guessed, we weren't actually all that close. Even after we had successfully unhooked all 100 lights we then had to untangle them from the tree, an activity which was made harder because not only was the strand wrapped around the base in several place, it actually turned out to be a loop of lights, which means there wasn't one end we could just try and pull from. We ended up having to take the lights up and over the tree like a Southern Belle's ballgown. Once we finally got the broken strand out my father was so annoyed he couldn't even be bothered to try and repair it. (Thank God, because there was no way I was sticking around to put them back on, at least not as well as they had been on before.) Ultimately, he just connected a regular strand of lights on the now-empty section of the tree.

Look, I'm well aware that it wouldn't be Christmas if I didn't spend some time fighting with lights. In fact, I'm sure part of this is just holiday karma for last year going so smoothly. But, the entire point of my parents getting a pre-lit tree was because my dad didn't want to spend any time fighting with tree lights and I'm pretty sure he spent more time working on lights this year than in the last few years combined. And while I mostly blame Martha Stewart for making a sub-standard product (and charging a lot of money for it), I also think the complicated nature of the wiring didn't help. I buy cheap lights all the time and as long as I follow directions they last more than one Christmas. I'm just annoyed because it shouldn't be this hard to fix a pre-lit Christmas tree. Also, I only know three ways to repair Christmas lights (check the bulbs, check the fuses and then shake the crap out of them). Once those all fail, I'm officially out of ideas. It wouldn't have been ideal, but if the strand had simply gone out because a light had blown and replacing it had just been a matter of either finding and replacing that one bulb or pulling off the whole strand of lights and replacing it with another, that would have been preferable to the complicated process we ended up having to deal with. It's part of the consumer/business social contract: if you are going to make a flimsy product that is hard to repair, at least have the common courtesy to make it easy to replace.