They don’t make em like they used to

I think my house has gremlins …or maybe critters.

Things keep breaking all over the place.  Old things.  New Things.  Complicated things.  Simple things.  Things that shouldn’t break.  Things that broke before, were fixed, and are now broken in a completely different place.

Broken crap.

All over the danged house.

What I hate the most…what *eats* at me…is that I can’t fix any of them.

I have a garage full of (mostly non-broken) tools – very expensive and well-cared-for ones, at that – yet all the king’s screwdrivers and all the king’s hammers cannot put humpty the dishwasher together again.

Here’s a very short list of the things that broke – all by themselves, look-ma-no-hands – in the past year:

• Dishwasher – those little plastic wheelie things keep falling off the racks after snapping in half
• Oven – The heating element burst into an awe-inspiring display of fireworks and melted right through itself.  I thought there was an arc-welder in my kitchen
• Lawn mower – The steel bolt that holds the left side of the handle on broke, so now it mows in circles
• Heater – Our 5 year old heat furnace blew a propeller.  No idea how or why, it just rusted right through.
• Garbage disposal – Started leaking.  Mind you – it’s the third one we’ve installed in 4 years
• Fire alarms – Every 2-5 months, on a random day of the week, half of them go off by themselves, mostly during naps, dinner, showers and other mostly inappropriate times.  Changed the batteries and vacuumed every six months.
• Refrigerator – Don’t get me started.  Plastic doohickies and thingamabobs fly off constantly.  The water dispenser stopped working for a month, soon after the whole cooling element was replaced.
• Washing machine – Recently started spouting water when we wash pillows
• Laptop – Compaq or HP.  One or the other.  It’s our fourth one, and died last month just like all the others – internal power supply is completely shot.
• Lawn Umbrellas x 2 – Fell over once and the spokes broke.  Whee.
• Vacuum Cleaner – The handle broke clean off.  Snapped right in two.  I swear I didn’t hit it, and I’m pretty sure all we did was *vacuum* with it.
• Stereo receiver – Volume now works backwards.  Clockwise turns it down, counter-clockwise turns it up.

Now, we don’t buy always buy the most expensive stuff – we tend to go middle of the road + a little more, most of the time.  Almost all of the above are name-brand products known (more or less) to be respectable.

What I would really hope (in my wildest dreams) is that some enterprising company (or companies) out there can figure out a way to market and sell products that last longer than 2-3 years.

Then again, maybe my expectations are too high.

Bleah.