The last one was about cars, this one's about houses. Come to think of it, shit in general. Blech.
So I live in a house that was built in the sixties. Solid concrete basement area, tanalized hardwood frame, brick exterior, solid wood floors, etc. Roof was replaced 10-odd years ago.
Of course, being the sixties, no insulation. (Good thing too - in the day it was asbestos and getting that out of the walls basically means tearing the entire house down.) Had to get that in the roof and floor, and you can't get it in the walls easily - requires gutting the whole house, stuffing the walls, and re-paneling. Got a heat pump installed too, still has a functional fireplace.
This is all standard maintenance/upkeep/modernizing that you have to do over the years. For a 50+ year old place it's actually pretty damn good.
Unfortunately this is where the yuppies come in...
Last owner was a builder. Most jackleg sonofabitch that I've ever had the misfortune to fix up after. The shit he screwed up is unbelievable. Not big, big stuff - no - small, stupid, niggling stuff.
The kind of stuff that nobody in their right mind would screw up. Let alone a builder.
Stuff that is, in aggregate, bloody expensive to sort out. Death of a thousand cuts type of expensive.
Example. Over time, the light fixtures break. Usual stuff. They get replaced. If you can't find something that works, you might save up a thou and then get the whole lot replaced with the same (more modern) type. Assuming that you give a damn, which I don't particularly.
Not this fucker and his ho.
They went through and replaced about 2/3rds of things, with such a mishmash of shit...recessed, spotlight, fixture, strip...which results in a heck of a lot of inconvenience. The biggest one is having to keep four different types of lightbulbs on hand.
See, in NZ we have a standard lightbulb and socket that is bayonet type. They're actually quite a pain in the ass, the spring-loading takes some force to replace bulbs, so you can bust the bulbs as you put them in and take them out. (Not something that you want to do with the "eco-friendly" flouro bulbs - when it happens, clean up immediately.)
Modern "fixtures" generally have screw-bulbs. Very convenient, especially for older folks like my parents. *BUT* you can't get these to replace the standard bayonet socket. Very inconvenient.
Then of course, there's various dickwad multi-lamp spotlight things out there. Yet a third bulb to have on hand...
...the stupid fluoro strip over the bathroom handbasin...
...modern LED fuckin' fixtures that you can't replace the fuckin' LED, you have to replace the entire fuckin' fixture...
...and pretty soon you have a shelf that's half-filled with bulbs of various types, just so you have one of everything that you're gonna be needing at short notice.
One day, you just might get the urge to say "fuck it" and go toddle off to get some kind of fixture that fits the general decor of a 50yo house, because you're getting sick of not having the right kind of bulb when one rather "unique" light fixture goes. (It's inevitable and a fiddly pain in the ass to replace. Literally a half-hour of playing around, which you don't want to be doing with a torch. Short winter days, by the time you get home on weekdays you only have the torch as an option.)
That's when you realize that all the modern "fixtures" are shit. Even when they cost about $70 a pop, they're designed badly (deliberate, of course). The only conclusion that you can figure is that the plan was based on a crayon drawing by the neighbors' fuckin' retarded kid, I shit you not.
(Not, mind you, that this is all about the lights in this place. Or any place. This is just one small symptom of the fucktardism out there that ends up in housing. Or bikes. Or computers. Or cars. Or whatever.)
Of course, these prior yuppie owners - despite the hubby being a fuckin' builder - use the most crappily expensive shit out there and put it together in the most jackleg manner, that taking things apart and replacing them is hours of work.
Literally, about 3 hours going back'n'forth. 'Cause they did bright shit like putting wood-screws directly into gib board (Americans call it drywall) which you can damn near piss through and left it hanging on a prayer, some of the screws stuck in with some kinda glue, et-fucking-cetera. Couple that with fucked designs of fixtures, to go with other fucked-up shit that morons do to "fix" things, everything is on a par know-what-I-mean.
This shit is endemic.
It's like the i-stop in certain cars (no, Apple didn't put a car out - Mazda). The stated purpose is to "save you petrol/money" by turning off your engine when you're stopped at the sign/light - you're saving the environment too, yippee whee skip. Reality is that you can idle your car for a couple hours on a liter of gas, so unless you're sitting in a goddamn traffic-jam you aren't actually saving fuck-all.
In a traffic jam - you got fingers to turn keys, don'tcha?
If the battery gets a little bit flat (which it does with all the stop-start bullshit) then the i-stop doesn't actually turn the engine off, because if it did then your car would be dead until you got a jump-start. BTW, from experience it takes about 8-10 stop-starts to where the battery is borderline and it leaves the engine running to keep the battery topped up. IE about 10 blocks in the city.
This's just more superficially-useful yet actually sub-standard electronic junk that can break, thank you very fucking much.
So this is all on the par with electric cars and the like - bullshit that nobody wants, dumb marketing to make it sound good, and the retards who "learn" about this get all smug about it as they drive their yuppie shitbox around. They're about a millionth of a hair above people who watch infomercials, same shit different day.
At least the infomercial people don't generally bullshit themselves. They know it's garbage.
Lipstick on a pig. Might look good, still a goddamn pig. A helluva lot of people do this to themselves, with everything in their lives, with everything that they do, voluntarily.
Muy estupido.
No comments:
Post a Comment