One of the downsides of being an adult is that really boring and silly things make me excited. In this case a new lawnmower. My old one was, let’s just say, old and busted, and my brother in law kidnapped and murdered it (more on that in a bit), so I need to get a new one to avoid being “that house” on the street with the completely unkept lawn.
I delayed and delayed and actually have been cutting the lawn with a weed eater (not recommended) and finally a couple of weeks ago shopping I said to myself “I’m an adult, I can solve this problem”, and wandered into Canadian Tire to find their cheapest one. I really only need the bare minimum, not just because I’m cheap but because the area is postage stamp size (see above about being able to use a weed eater).
The cheapest one was about $200 and was a plug in, so I also had to buy a 100’ extension cord to hopefully get from the front door to the grass beside the road (hell that cost almost a third the cost of the lawnmower itself!). Bought it with my adult money and my adult problem solving and when I got it home I was reminded that there are battery powered ones, and found one for about the same price but ran on a rechargeable battery pack.
So without even taking the lawnmower out of the car I took it and the extension cord back and returned it.
Then I ordered the one online. It was a Saturday when I ordered it and it said it shipped Monday the 5th. Of course it didn’t ship Monday, but took a week (the 12th before it was picked up by the shipping company.
Then it sat in “departed sort facility” for another week – travelling in the back of an ‘89 pinto driving across the country? Literally it takes 7 days of driving if you drive 6 hours a day to get from the origin to here. Hell if you do the map it takes 11 days if you were to go by bicycle.
Finally my precious new lawnmower (I don’t even remember what I ordered at this point) is local, amazing, hurrah. Due to be delivered Monday, I waited with bated breath all day. Expecting a truck to drop off a big box at the front door any second.
End of day, nothing. Checked the tracking and “Mechanical delay”.
Crap.
But stuff happens, such is life. Maybe a tire blew up, engine exploded, who knows. Ok, I’m sure it’ll arrive tomorrow (tomorrow now being today).
So again today I waited for a big truck to show up. I even kept an eye on the road for a delivery vehicle when I snuck out at lunch to get an overpriced, overly sweet coffee from Starbucks.
End of the day I check the delivery status again.
”Mechanical delay”
WTH? Two trucks in two days? Is this package radioactive? Full of ghost energy that’s killing trucks?
So I guess we’ll see what happens tomorrow…
Oh, the BIL kidnapping and killing the lawnmower. So the story is that the lawnmower I had (just a normal gas powered push mower) worked fine even though it was old. I tried to start it up this spring and it went “chug… chug… chug… chug… ” instead of its normal “chug… chug.. chugga chugga chugga vroom”. So I asked BIL, being a mechanical person, if he could take a look at it. Probably just needs a new sparkplug or something, easy for someone who works on cars and trucks and big machines all day.
Then I hear nothing and then a week later I asked and was told “it was dead and the deck fell apart”. I call shenanigans on this. Yes it was rusty, but I wasn’t disintegrating by any means. The engine was running “kinda” and not completely dead or I wouldn’t have sent it. I think that it was “helped” to die to get it out of the way <suspicious look>.
That’s my theory anyway.