Adventures in Jewelry Repair
When I purchased my wife's engagement ring and wedding band from Reeds Jewelers, I popped for an optional extended warranty plan along with it. I figured if I was already paying close to $2,000 for a piece of jewelry I might as well take a few extra steps to take special care of the thing seeing as how it's a big investment in my eyes, albeit one that is physically very small. The warranty covers more or less everything under the sun when it comes to repairs, however it does nothing for us regarding replacement were it to be lost or stolen. The way it was described to me, the warranty is so thorough that if the rings were shattered into pieces so long as we could return the stones and metal they would be able to make the ring whole. (Trust me, I'm in no rush to test that claim.) Other items also included on the coverage were resizing, rhodium plating, cleaning, and the like. General maintenance, in other words, all things geared towards keeping that rock on my wife's finger shining like it were brand new.
And it's a good thing that I did choose to purchase this warranty because my wife managed to dislodge one of the stones from the setting of her engagement ring not long after I'd given it to her. How, I have no idea - I just remember the day it happened as being full of tears (for her) and thoughts along the lines of (earmuffs, kids) "Well, what the f#&^ am I supposed to do now?" from me. Fortunately, by the grace of the good Lord above, she found the stone and we were able to get it repaired. What's more, the jeweler at Reeds who did the repairs went so far as to modify the ring so that the stones were, as he put it, "sitting in a basket".
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| My wife's ring, prior to getting its "basket" modification |
"Basket" sounds better in this context as opposed to cage or box, I guess, right?
The one oddity to the warranty is that it requires us to bring the rings into a Reeds location once every six months so that it can be inspected for any potential issues. They even gave us a little pamphlet to keep up with as the clerk performing the inspection notates their having seen the ring in it. My wife and I have been married for more than 3 years now and we've been faithful to that requirement as every six months I find myself having to wander into a store that is essentially a mine field. "We're just here to get the rings checked", I say to myself while we're there. "Keep her on track and don't let her wander around, lest you find yourself dropping another couple grand on overpriced baubles..." Don't get me wrong - it's not that I don't want my wife to have nice things, I just know that there are a lot more useful things in this world than jewelry that could be purchased with that same money (this logical approach to spending brought to you by my overwhelming sense of buyer's remorse).
Low and behold, we were due to bring the ring in this month so the wife and I made our way to the nearest Reeds Jewelers, that being the one within Columbiana Centre near the Harbison Boulevard area of Columbia, South Carolina. (Side note: A fascist was clearly involved in the organization of this mall, else "center" would've been spelled correctly.) It's an okay mall as malls go (very glamorous, lots of white and tile surfaces and plenty of shops smelling of wretched colognes with EDM blaring over their sound systems) but I haven't had much use for shopping malls since video arcades went the way of the Dodo bird. Nevertheless, the mall serves a purpose, and for us on this evening it was to facilitate the continued brilliance of one piece of jewelry.
We entered the store (which is conveniently located near one of the entrances to the mall) and my wife handed over her rings to the nearest clerk who was a young Caucasian woman, more than likely in her early 20s, with brown hair just past her shoulders. She looked like your typical college-aged girl, one who'd probably played sports at some point in her life. She was wearing a low-cut, somewhat tight-fitting dress with white, yellow, and blue stripes that ended just where it would have to in order to defend her modesty.
Why did I go into such detail in describing this clerk? Because quite honestly I'm old enough and wise enough to know a gimmicky retail trap when I see one. Stores like this don't hire girls like her because of their abilities in salesmanship, they hire them because they know some poor schmuck is going to buy something he can't afford because the pretty girl behind the counter told him it looks nice. I saw it happen myself when my wife and I were shopping for her ring. We were in a different store but it was the same set up; attractive girl leaning over jewelry displays showing ample amounts of cleavage gets a guy to buy, you guessed it, a high-end engagement ring and all the while he's staring at her chest like his life depended on it. It's hilarious while it's also demeaning - such is life.
My wife has passed off her ring and the clerk has taken it into the repair shop area of the store for inspection. A few minutes later the clerk returns. Much to my wife's dismay, she informs us that one of the stones is loose and the ring will need to be serviced. Wifey doesn't like to be without her bling, you see, and I don't blame her. Be that as it may, I'm not worried because we've done what we were supposed to and this is exactly the sort of thing that the warranty is supposed to catch. Then the clerk says something along the lines of "There will be a charge for this kind of service..."
Despite what Tits McShortdress believed to be accurate, there would be no charge for tightening the setting. It took a few extra minutes and the assistance of an older, more experienced member of the sales staff (who was a guy - I point that out just because) to verify what my wife and I already knew. I somewhat had the impression that they thought they might be able to get one over on us - no dice, I'm afraid. As it stands, we'll be able to pick the ring up soon and I'm sure it will be immaculate. If it isn't, lets just say I've been playing enough Grand Theft Auto 5 lately to know how to handle the matter.
Oddly Worded Advertisements
Generally speaking, I loathe advertisements. As in to a point where while I'm watching TV I will change the channel from a program I enjoy just to go to another channel with a show I have little to no interest in for the mere fact that they aren't running an ad at the time. This strategy doesn't work consistently, though, because those sneaky networks are in cahoots with one another in that nowadays they all seem to go to commercial at the same time. Hence the reason why I keep my phone or tablet nearby so that I can browse Facebook or Twitter - where I get a completely different set of ads, which I can at least scroll past with haste.
Speaking of online ads, YouTube and Hulu Plus present their own set of annoyances when it comes to the forced consumption of advertising. Hulu Plus is a paid subscription-based service, yet users are still subjected to ads and I have no idea why; you would think since people are paying to get to their content the need for ads would've been eliminated, but no, you still get ads. What's unique about Hulu Plus is the fact that when you're watching via their website and an ad comes on you have the ability to tell Hulu Plus whether or not the ad is pertinent to you. I find this hilarious because I click "no" every time purely out of spite - it hasn't yielded any real change in things, but it does make me feel better, if only for a moment, about having potentially influenced their system.
I tend to watch a fair amount of random videos via the YouTube app on one of my mobile devices. Typically there will be one or two ads per session that get tacked onto the opening of whatever clip it is I happen to be watching. These ads are usually short in length but they are incredibly redundant. I am not kidding when I say that I have been served with the same Booking.com ad no less than 50 times here lately. I would never in my life use Booking.com, simply because of having been inundated with their crappy ad.
I'm going to assume that my brain is an advancement in the continued evolution of our species seeing as how I have the innate ability to not permit advertising to influence my buying habits. I've searched my recent memory and the only product for which I've willfully submitted to allowing its corresponding ad to influence me is that of Dollar Shave Club, which is a product line I actually recommend highly. Great razors at a low cost shipped to your home every month - what's not to love about that?
I've turned my dislike for advertising into an opportunity for humor here recently as I've begun noticing that companies are using adjectives in their scripts that strike me as being too odd to ignore. For example, why is it that suddenly so many fast food chains are obsessed with making sure that you know they're using "real" ingredients? I guess recent revelations that "beef" from eateries like Taco Bell and McDonald's is more akin to Soylent Green than legitimate beef has made them paranoid. As if that's supposed to make customers feel better about eating a highly processed food product loaded with preservatives and additives. What's funnier to me are the ads for products like iced cream or breakfast bars - they contain "real iced cream", "real oats", and "real fruit". As opposed to what, exactly? Fake iced cream? Fake oats? Fake fruit? Have things gotten so bad in our culture that we now have to be convinced as consumers that we're not ingesting flavored plastics or something?
Flaming Lean Pockets
I could probably count on one hand the number of times I've eaten a Hot Pocket over the course of my life. I've eaten plenty of food items that have had the distinction of being nuked in a microwave instead of cooked by more traditional means, but Hot Pockets were never one of those go-to things that ranked high up on my list of instant eats. For one, they aren't exactly appetizing to me - the dough is nothing like a pizza crust and the contents are so hot your palette can't process what their flavor is. I'm not one to eat something merely because of convenience, so just the fact that they can be ready in a hurry does nothing for me. Does that make me a snob? Maybe, but at least I can say with satisfaction that I'm unwilling to compromise certain things, one of them being what I decide to shove into my pie hole.
That said, earlier this month prior to heading out to attend a local independent professional wrestling card (see blog entry "WrestleForce Presents Fall Brawl 4 - A Date with Fate") I wanted to get a bite to eat but I didn't want fast food and I didn't want to engage in a full sit down meal. We tend to keep a fairly well stocked pantry at home but there wasn't a whole lot therein this day that struck my fancy either. I remembered that my wife had recently picked up a box of Lean Pockets (pepperoni pizza flavored, I believe) and I figured "Why not?"
I retrieved one of the Lean Pockets from the box in the freezer of our refrigerator. I put the box away then realized that there were no instructions on how to revive the thing from its cryogenic slumber printed on its individual packaging. I will fully admit that I didn't want to have to dig the box back out of the freezer - it wasn't that I was in a hurry or that the box was buried deep within the chill chest, I was just too lazy to go look at the instructions on the box myself. So what did I do? I asked my wife, "Hey, baby - how long do you have to put these Lean Pockets in the microwave?" She's cooked several of them since buying that box so I expected her to have that information.
"I don't know...", she said. "7 minutes, maybe? Look at the box!"
In hindsight, I should've known better than to go along with anything she said that followed "I don't know". Not doing so was the first mistake I made that day. Nevertheless, I put the Lean Pocket into the microwave, set the timer for 7 minutes, and turned it on then walked back to our bedroom to chat with my wife while it was warming up. That was the second mistake I made that day.
I was in our bedroom maybe 3 or 4 minutes before I went to walk back towards the kitchen. Our home is laid out in such a way that there's a hallway which leads from the front of the house where the living room/kitchen are to the back of the house where all the bedrooms are. When I came out of our bedroom and looked towards the kitchen, all I could see was a plume of smoke pouring out of the kitchen and into the living room...
I run to the kitchen and immediately open the door to the microwave. There was so much smoke that I couldn't tell when I got near it whether the light inside was from the bulb that illuminates the interior of the device or if the Lean Pocket was on fire. Fortunately, the pastry wasn't ablaze however it had been cooked to the point of being not much more than a charcoal briquette shaped like a Lean Pocket.
The aftermath of this incident has been lingering for more than a week now as the smoke got into every room of the house but especially the kitchen and living room. We attempted to air out the space as much as possible by opening up the windows and back door as well as turning on all the fans, including that of our air conditioner. I was trying to aid matters by using a beach towel to fan the smoke out the windows - I don't know how much good it did but the haze did eventually go away. The smell has dissipated with time and a lot of air freshener but we get treated to a less than subtle reminder of my folly whenever we use the microwave as the exhaust fan belches out air that's scented with smoke.
I learned two things from this experience.
1) Never walk away from food that you are in the process of cooking, regardless of whether you're using a stove, microwave, or any other implement of food preparation
2) Never rely on your wife when it comes to accurate information regarding cooking times for microwavable products
I'm sorry, honey - it's going to take a lot for you to re-earn my trust, because of course this wasn't my fault.
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