The Elder Statesman

By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here

If I were superstitious, I’d blame all this on today. Well, it is Friday the Thirteenth, you know.

But actually I think several Friday the Thirteenths came and went before I finally resolved this consumer dilemma. The new lock on my new "Knock on Wood" screen door leading out to my new patio was missing a rosette.

Simple solution was to go to the nearest hardware store and buy a Dexter model 2050 B/B storm door rosette, exterior bright brass finish, right? Wrong.

I was told that this was a collector’s item and rare as the proverbial hen’s teeth.

This meant an old researcher like myself, who has been known to find hen’s teeth, went on a search of every hardware store, junk shop. antique dealer and thrift store for miles around. Other than a lot of dumb stares, I found that this particular item was rarer than hen’s teeth.

My research, however was not entirely without gaining a great deal of knowledge about the consumer dilemma in 2007. Here’s what I learned:

Dexter sold to Master Lock in 1989. Master Lock in turn sold to Black and Decker in 1992. B&D sold to a European investment group which owns Electrolux, which divested many of its Master Lock assets to a company called Ives in New Britain, Connecticut, which sub contracts its production to China. As of 2003, a rosette equivalent to Dexter model 2050 B/B was available for retail sales under the Ives brand name.

After many letters, phone calls and other means of communication the equivalent to Dexter model 2050 B/B storm door rosette finally arrived. Case solved?

Not in today’s consumer society. It came without screws. 
Simple. Right? Wrong again.

The hardware man wanted to know if I wanted metal screws or wood screws.

I should have guessed the answer, but to protect myself from another long research product, I bought both kinds.

I should have known because it is a wooden screen door.

But logic no longer works in the globalization of a screen latch.

The consumer has been virtually locked out.

I have discovered this is not a do-it-yourself society. Nothing seems fixable, at least not for handyman dummies like myself. There was a time when someone as unskilled as I am could, say, replace a pull cord on the lawnmower after some Sampson pulled it right out of the socket on the machine. No longer, I discovered after finding a metric Allen wrench and removing layers of parts to reach the pull cord housing, I had to remove the entire motor to get to it.

I took it to the place I bought it from. Of course they could fix it, but first I had to pay a $30 consulting fee just for them to look at it. I am still waiting for the repair estimate. That is consumerism 2007, a time when whatever you buy is built for obsolescence.

I firmly believe all of this is the fault of tech writers who explain everything in Chinese and then translate it into English. I recall reading about a man who bought a new lawn mower in a box and tried to assemble it according to the assembly instructions. He finally gave up, remembering the farmhand at his dad’s farm was an excellent handyman, too.

He picked up all the parts and put them in the trunk of his car

and drove to the farm and asked the handy farmhand to assemble it. When he got back to his home in town, the instructions were laying of the floor of the garage. He picked them up, drove back to the farm, only to find the handy farmhand testing out the new mower on the farmhouse lawn.

The man apologized for not leaving the instructions to which the handy farmhand said: "They wouldn’t have done me any good. I can’t read."

That’s my trouble. I am a reader.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)