COLUMN: Fool proof? I doubt it
I recently bought a $29.95 five-step ladder at the local Home Cavern that required no assembly and should have been basically cash-and-carry and fool proof. At least that is what you’d think.
However, it came with 335 words worth of warnings and instructions. Too many lawyers in the ladder factory, you say?
You may be right, but it also seems a little strange that as long as you’re not a registered lunatic or criminal, you can buy a gun with hardly any, and if our legislators have their way, no instructions at all. But you know, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” Well, from the looks of the ladder warnings, there are a lot of ladders killing people.
It’s happening everywhere. I know it’s true because I just saw it on a the most recent episode of “America’s Most Desperate-to-Get-on-TV People” – where you get to watch real criminals in the privacy of your own home because there is such a shortage of movies on this subject. It went something like this:
“Hey man, give me all your money and your watch or I’ll make you climb this ladder without the instructions. I’m desperate dude. Don’t think that I won’t do it. Just last week I knocked over a 7-Eleven with a kitchen stool.”
However, I know this is an unfair comparison. Guns are an integral part of our American heritage. I guess our forefathers and mothers just had to stand on each other’s shoulders because we have no heritage of ladder ownership.
I support instructions on ladders. You can’t just let people run around willy or nilly using ladders any way they want.
On the other hand, I know everybody ought to be able to have guns to protect their homes, put meat on the table and ventilate Forest Service and interstate highway signs. No, really, the holes in the signs provide a valuable service to travelers. The number of holes in the sign is a good indicator that natives in the upcoming town should be dealt with in a kind and unthreatening manner.
I’ll get off the gun thing because the real message behind the 335 words of warning on a step ladder is that somehow the term “fool proof” no longer applies to what we so arrogantly consider intelligent life on this planet.
A friend of mine who worked in the emergency room told me that several times a year people would come in with severe burns resulting from trying to iron the wrinkles out of the clothes they were wearing. Multiply this by thousands of emergency rooms across the country and you can be sure that at least one of those well-pressed people out there is trying to sue an appliance company for not warning them against this practice.
Sadly there are probably some readers out there saying to themselves “Hmm, ironing your clothes while you’re wearing them, that could really save me some time.”
Add fool proof to, “you can’t miss it, I’ll get back to you on that, let’s have lunch sometime, thanks for asking, no new taxes, I have no recollection of that and our party supports family values” as words that used to mean something. They’re now just verbal croutons on the cliché salad we serve up each day.