Pa, Jason's grandfather, is 88 years old. Among the items he brought over for his visit is an old broken thermos stopper. He's held on to it for years -- over a decade, at least -- because he's determined to track down the company in Nashville, Tennessee, in order to procure a replacement.
When Jason handed me the broken stopper, I said, "what am I supposed to do with this?"
"Could you go online and maybe track down the company and see if you can get a new stopper?"
"Why doesn't he just get a new thermos? A decent one is, like, $20 or something."
Jason shrugged. "I don't know. Just see what you can find, OK?"
It turns out that Pa's thermos is so old that the company that made it hasn't existed for years. It was bought out by another company and the thermos models have all changed. The thermos stopper model he needs isn't manufactured anymore. I couldn't even find one on Ebay.
As I was searching, I was wondering to myself whether my attitude of "just replace the damned thing" was a by-product of the wasteful consumer culture we live in. When I lived in India (well before its economy opened up and modernized), it was always cheaper to get something fixed than to buy a new one. You'd go down to the corner market and there was always a guy with MacGuyver-esque talents who could fix your broken TV with a fork, some toothpaste and an old rusted spark plug.
Similarly, when we were in Detroit last week, my mom was helping my grandpa clean out his basement, and discovered that he had kept every telephone that he had ever owned, even though they were all old and broken. I guess he just figured that it was wasteful to toss them because they could have been fixed.
I have exactly the opposite inclination. Unless a really expensive big-ticket item like a fridge or something is involved, it's almost always cheaper and easier just to replace things that have broken. I'm the opposite of a pack rat -- I love throwing things away. If I had been Pa, it wouldn't have occurred to me to keep something as inexpensive to replace as a thermos.
I don't know if that's good or bad.
I think it's adorable that he kept that. I wonder if this is because you, like me, got very used to people collecting and USING the things you were getting rid of. I'm more of a try to get it fixed-er. It really chagrined me that it was cheaper to buy a new digital camera than fix mine (which I dropped) - only because it feels so wasteful.
ReplyDeleteI'm definitely a merciless thrower away. It was one source of friction when I first started living with my now-husband. He still has NOTEBOOKS FROM HIGH SCHOOL. He graduated high school in 1995 and he's a software engineer, so it's not like anything he learned then is even remotely relevant now. We finally reached a compromise between my "it all goes" and his "it all stays". I would definitely have thrown out the thermos...
ReplyDeletehmmmm, i think i am the worst of all worlds. i keep everything while still knowing that i am going to buy a new one, as well.
ReplyDelete