17 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
17 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "This Is What's Wrong with American Workmanship Today"
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date: '2011-09-24T13:05:35-04:00'
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permalink: /this-is-whats-wrong-with-american-workmanship-today/
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tags:
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- grousing
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---
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I got my watch as a gift in the fall of 2001. The battery that was in it when I received it lasted a really long time — five years, perhaps. And then it died, as they do, and I had it replaced. And the next one lasted a little less long — perhaps a little over three years. And then it died, just as I moved to New York for my sabbatical last August. So one of the first things I did when I arrived here was to find a place to have the battery replaced. It was a teeny little storefront that did shoe repair and a few other random things, and when I asked the ancient Asian guy behind the counter about my watch battery, he pulled out a battered shoe box and flipped through several dozen half-empty and decidedly Carter-era-looking cards of watch batteries, holding them up against mine before coming up with one that he finally put in my watch.
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This scene left me not terrifically surprised when my watch stopped again this July — the very day I started work at the MLA, in fact. There’s no telling how long that battery had been sitting in that shoebox. So this time, I took the watch around the corner to an actual jeweler, where I had to leave it overnight. But I figured it was worth it, right? You get what you pay for, and all that.
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My watch stopped again yesterday, after 2.5 months.
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One of two things is happening here: either something has gone wrong with my watch such that it is now chewing through batteries at an ever-increasing rate, or the quality of batteries is plummeting. And I’m just not sure how much I want to spend in order to figure out which it is…
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