Ok, I'm not going to make any patriotic comments on what our country does and what other countries do, or draw any conclusions on what is better now. You can probably interpret my feelings from what I will say. And here is where I will sound like an old man.They don't make crap like they used to.
Even pencils. Actually, it's the pencils that bother me the most! I'm an artist and so I use a lot of pencils and I spend a lot of time sharpening said pencils. And it bothers the crap out of me that the above can happen.
I bought my son 2 24 packs of pencils for school. The teacher asked that they come to their first day with all pencils sharpened. So I broke out our newish pencil sharpener and opened the box of 24 pencils.
Of the 24 pencils 6 were defective. By that I mean that they will never sharpen fully. Up and down the pencil graphite is a series of small breaks, so after you sharpen it for a few seconds the graphite tip breaks off and you have to start all over. You never get to use it. Of the 18 that were not defective in that way, the wood was so chewed up that actually taxed the electric sharpener to sharpen them.
After sharpening 30 pencils the motor burned out on this sharpener.
Ordinarily I am for technology replacing mundane manual tasks like using a crank pencil sharpener. But only if the technology can actually do as good a job or better. Here is my vote for going back to crank pencil sharpeners. Oh, and quality pencils that you can actually use would be nice too.
1 comment:
Alas I remember cracking open a brand new pack of prismacolor color pencils(the most expensive at the time) only to find they must have been repeatedly dropped as pencil was broken on the inside... sharpened down to nubs still unused, I forsaked them for my old cheap pen.
Not all was better in the old days... ;)
Cheers!
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