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Month: May 2022

When it rains, it pours (in the laundry room)

When it rains, it pours (in the laundry room)

Mr. Tucker has always had a tumultuous relationship with the appliances that came with our house. From my perspective, he has an overly inflated view of how well appliances should function in today’s age. In his view, if you pay that much for something, they should work flawlessly. Truth be told, we’re both partially right.

It started at our old house we replaced our 30-year-old top loader & dryer with an energy efficient Samsung washer & dryer. Within a year we had to call the appliance repair person who basically told us that they were garbage appliances. He came back thrice that year to fix something until finally Mr. Tucker just decided to completely replace the dryer.

Since we had previously had good experiences with Kenmore, the Sears brand, Mr. Tucker decided that we should buy that brand with one caveat: no technology! He wanted an old-school clicky dial and mechanical machine that wasn’t governed by microchips and touchscreens*. When he went to Sears (RIP *snif*) to buy one, the salesperson explained that while their machines had dials that clicked and felt like low-tech, old school versions, they still had microchips and were still riddled with technology. In fact, the chances of getting an appliance there that didn’t have a microchip in it was zero. Still, we bought the cheapest model and it went on to serve us well until we moved out of the house.

To be fair, the man who used to own The Mullet loved this house and put top-of-the-line appliances in. Some (like the Dacor gas range) work amazingly and other ones (the Frigidaire Gallery dishwasher and fridge) not so much. Overall though, the appliances have done us well over the past 5 years in the house. Still, all good things must come to an end and a few things have.

1 – Mr. Tucker gets furious with the ice maker in our refrigerator but it’s the cheap shelves that are the real issue for me. The glass shelves inside the fridge have started to crack their plastic holders, which is frustrating enough but all the door shelves have busted off too. The most exasperating part is that a door shelf is $100 – for like a 6″ x 15″ piece of plastic! That’s just bonkerstown.

2 – The wall oven died slowly over the course of the spring. In its defense, it was original to the house (built in 1962) so it didn’t owe anyone, anything. Avoiding the more common, inexpensive brands we ended up deciding to splurge on a low-tech, higher-quality Italian brand. The cost? Approximately $3000 with installation. Wall ovens are expensive though and a comparable common brand would have been $1500-$2300. We wanted to go with a quality product that would last though and hit the low-middle range of the higher quality products.

3 – Then as we waited for 3 weeks for the oven install, the dishwasher died. At some point we will have our appliance guy out to look at it but until then the kids are washing the dishes by hand. They keep asking when we will have a dishwasher again and Mr. Tucker replies, “But we already have two dishwashers!” He’s definitely in his Dad joke years.

4 – The seal on the clothes washing machine somehow became twisted and we had a small deluge in the laundry room. Thankfully, Mr. Tucker caught it in time & it was something he could fix. Still, after all the other appliance drama I think that was the last straw and had we had to ALSO replace the washer he probably would have just walked out into the woods, never to return.

When we were in the thick of all the appliance drama, one night I tried to explain that unlike previous generations – even our parent’s generation – we tend to have an overly-inflated view of how much free time we should have and how much time we should spend on life tasks. Previous generations did more home and garden maintenance than we do, and even 100 years ago the expectation that you would have any free time was not a given except for a few moments snatched here or there. Life was work from the time you got up until the time you went to sleep. But for those of us who are Gen X or younger, we tend to think of most things outside of our work hours as free time. We hire people to do a lot of the maintenance around the house that previous generations did themselves on the evenings and weekends. So when things break – as they most certainly do in the age of Planned Obsolescence – we get angry at having spent money on things that are costing us precious free time when they were designed to GIVE us more free time.

So maybe that is why we are reluctant to call the appliance repair person yet AGAIN to look at the dishwasher: the kids are washing the dishes and it is working well enough for us so why spend the money? We also made the decision to not replace the shelves in the fridge – although I did float the idea of making some out of wood. I guess the situation isn’t, “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” so much as it is, “if it’s broke – do we really need it?” and “if we really need it, can we spend the money on something that won’t break down soon?” My final thought on this is something we should all consider: have I RTFM** and maintained the appliance properly? Chances are, that’s where the issue started.

*Hilarious for a man who works in IT and who used to believe in technology’s power to change the world. As the great Ella Fitzgerald once said, “What a difference a day makes.”
**Read the fucking manual

The History of work & the fallout

The History of work & the fallout

On our flight back from Puerto Rico in March, I ended up watching a documentary on overwork. It’s a very basic overview on the issue but I found it a good primer. It’s only 50 minutes long and you can find it online here:



Until I was diagnosed in 2018 I ran a blog that was loosely based on early retirement. Even before that, I had a livejournal that was personal but that also discussed frugality and Simple Living. I think I was lucky in the fact that when I was 18 years old and poor as shit, I came across The Tightwad Gazette which led me to Your Money or Your life – the de facto standard on early retirement. Since then, it was my goal to work as little as possible, save as much as possible and hopefully be out of the rat race fairly early in life.

I mean, GOAL ACHIEVED! C’mon, you HAVE to laugh: the universe has a cruel sense of humour.

(I have already discussed this origin story in this post if you are interested in the long version)

Of course, I would have loved to have continued working and been able bodied for a long, long time but given that this wasn’t an option, being able to keep some semblance of a salary plus benefits was a close second. As Tyrion Lannister said, “If you’re going to be a cripple, be a rich cripple.” While I’m not rich, I am also not struggling which is a gift.

So once we adapted to this we started working on Mr. Tucker’s escape from work but then he changed his mind. Since then, he’s received a promotion with a substantial raise, which is great considering how much inflation we’ve seen lately (and our appliances are dropping like flies, which is a post in itself).

Still, I am still interested in the idea of early retirement and working less because I feel it’s something that our communities (and the society at large) as well as the environment need. I think it’s absolutely bonkerstown that we can’t figure out how to make permanent part-time work…work. It’s interesting to watch Canada move towards universal dental care in the next couple of years with universal pharma care maybe not far behind it. These stressors are what make people panic about not working full time even though if more people worked part time there would be more work for everyone. Of course, since it’s an employees market right now, there may be room to negotiate these better hours for people.

The pandemic has really shone a light on how much we are stuck on that idea of workplaces as factories. There has been a battle between employees and employers over the past two years and despite the success of WFH some people still want to go back to the office. Employees who’ve generally enjoyed their time and money back from not commuting, not buying food out, not buying work-related clothes would like keep some flexibility in working from home. Employers on the other hand are still stuck in this 9-to-5 panopticon office mentality where they feel everyone should “put in their time.” The problem is that studies have shown that for knowledge work, it’s mostly task-based, not time based and that not all hours of the day are productive ones. It seems to me that if you are getting paid for your education, experience and output, that it is completely backwards to treat the workday like a factory you have to punch in and out of.

Of course, the flipside is that a lot of knowledge workers work in tech and tech has a vested interest in you sitting at your desk for as long as possible. People lauded Google for supplying their employees with such benefits as free meals, in-house doctors, hair cuts, oil changes etc. but as a friend who worked there once said to me, “Do you know why they do that? Because if you need to go to an appointment, that is a couple of hours of you not going “ticky-ticky” on your keyboard for the company. It’s cheaper to provide these services to employees to ensure they aren’t away from their desks for too long.”

In Ontario, where I live, they treat knowledge work like factory work – with the exception that there is no overtime pay for certain workers: IT, law, accounting, medicine and the entertainment industry. Also of note, many manual labourers who work in agricultural settings such as growing mushrooms and various other plants and trees for the retail trade (which is usually piecemeal work done by labourers brought into Canada on agricultural visas). Oh, and of course teenagers. So I question the factory model of “putting in the hours” when it’s clear that the output should be the yardstick of successful work.

But watch the video. I found it interesting and I especially enjoyed David Frayne’s The Refusal of Work for more comprehensive introduction to work theories. My only wish is that he had explored more of the case studies in the second half of the book.

* * *

I ended up taking out some of the books written by the interviewees of this documentary as well. So far, I have received:

– Team Human by Douglass Rushkoff.
– The Refusal of Work by David Frayne.
– McMindfulness by Ronald Purser (which I haven’t started yet).

I haven’t read anything by these folks also featured but will in the future:

– George Monbiot (whose website seems to have some interesting blog posts).
– Guy Standing who writes a lot on Universal Basic Income (UBI). A list of his books can be found on his website
– Jason Hickel who focuses on global inequality etc. website.
– I’ve seen a lot of Carl Honoré’s work because his books are pretty popular. His website.
– Faiza Shaheen has a book coming out in 2023 titled Know Your Place: how society sets us up to fail.
– Grace Blakely who writes about leftist politics in books and for the New Statesman
– Bredan Burchell (who hasn’t really written anything recently but is a professor at Cambridge).

People I couldn’t find any info on:
– Margaret Anderson, University of Michigan