OT Language (was Re: lost Desktop)

[Duncan]

Anne Wilson posted on Tue, 19 Jul 2011 19:30:29 +0100 as excerpted:

> The Channel Lock does look the nearest, but clearly it is much more
> "technical" than ours :-)  I have to admit, I do like the clean
> simplicity of this tool.  Absolutely nothing to go wrong (other than
> losing the pin :-) ) -
> a real no-nonsense tool.

Sounds like you've insufficient experience with dollar-store (pound-store?
euro-store?) level tools. =:^]  There's /always/ something that can go 
wrong, and I'm sure they'd find something here, too.  (This is a variant 
of the "there's always a more foolish fool" concept.  "There's always a 
cheaper, not as sturdy, version of the tool to be found at some dollar 
store /somewhere/." =:^)

They're not really that bad for the cost, in many cases, and sometimes 
(as with that one strange type of what they called "pipe wrench", that 
looked more like what we've been referring to here as an "English key") 
impressively good (and screwdrivers and ordinary pliers are quite 
consistently indistinguishable from stuff costing 4-10 times that in an 
ordinary store), which is why I still buy them, but... the general 
experience remains true.

I actually have a number of pair of "water pump pliers" from the dollar 
store.  They work reasonably well, which is why I have a number of pair, 
but the metal is definitely a softer grade, and in particular, the 
channel-lock area (which is thinner than the rest of the handle due to 
the channel groves) sometimes bends such that if you try to grip 
something too tightly, it'll slip a notch, thus defeating the purpose for 
some uses.  But for a buck a pair, I'm not going to argue.

With your tool, I suspect either the pin would be too soft and would 
break, or the metal of the handle would be thin (less metal==cheaper!, 
but they'd be covered with fancy looking plastic hand-grips so you 
couldn't tell how thin the metal handles actually were!) and soft enough 
that they'd bend.

So your "nothing to go wrong" simply demonstrates an insufficient 
experience with tools at the dollar-store grade where *someone* will 
surely devise a way to make the tool sufficiently cheaper that something 
WILL go wrong!  See?  =:^)

But back then, "they didn't know how to make stuff that cheap, so it was 
built to last and it's no surprise that it did", as I've seen it stated 
(tho in reality it's just that the cheap stuff broke and was thrown out 
long before now, and we're looking back with rose tinted memory).

But you're right, and the above is simply intended to make a hopefully 
somewhat humorous (humourous?) point.  But all joking aside, there /is/ 
something to be appreciated about that clean and elegant simplicity. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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