I sometimes think I should be working in some kind of quality control capacity. I can walk into any shop and unerringly pick up only products that are broken, scratched or past their sell-by dates. At my peak I can even find the one rogue piece of straight timber at my local DIY superstore. I'm a veritable cr*p magnet - surely someone, somewhere would pay me mega-bucks for this? While I'm waiting for the corporate execs with the large sacks of cash to arrive, I can take solace from Nigel Burkin's On My Workbench - it seems I'm not the only person who suffers from shoddy products and FOAD customer service, after all.
If I'm honest I've not actually painted anything significant for a good while (my airbrush gear hasn't seen the light of day since we last moved house in 1998 and I've got a lot of finished models sealed into ice-cream tubs to keep the dust off pending painting) but I can sympathise. This weekend we bought a new vacuum cleaner to replace a wholly unmerchandable product that refused to carry out it's routine, daily function. A lot of thought had obviously gone into design as in "odd-shaped purple bits" as opposed to "fit for purpose" and the product simply didn't work. You'd think that a vacuum that overheated and cut-out in under a minute, even with brand new filters, was "faulty" - but apparently not. It would seem that we've got the "wrong kind of dust." I can't tell you how relieved we were to be told this, as a friend's diagnosis of "bunch of no-good, lying m*******g b******s" had a certain ring of legal costs to it - but then he's a solicitor and was probably just touting for business...
Currently On My Stereo: Arena - Contagium EP.