We all use tools. All the time. So often that we frequently forget that when we are using something, it is a tool. We can all pretty much agree that certain things stand out as ‘tools’: most people have some sort of tool drawer, filled with hammers too small actually to hammer anything, and screwdrivers with broken ends, and pliers that never quite hold the thing we want to work on. In fact, in this telling, ‘tools’ are things that do NOT do what they are supposed to do. All this means is that the world is filled with bad tools. And with people who try to use a good tool for the wrong purpose, which generally makes it seem like a bad tool.
Working on a farm you become intensely aware of tools, since you are always using them. Mostly you are aware of them not being where you need them. You reach for a hammer but it is over in the other barn; you can’t remember where you left that pair of pliers after last used them; the shovel you need is at the other end of the fence. All of this, of course, is not the tool’s fault, it’s yours, and can be classified under absent-mindedness, or short-sightedness or some other -ness. Then there are the cases where you are simply let down by a crappy tool.
When we were packing for the move from Rhode Island to North Carolina I occasionally took advantage of the circumstances and got rid of something. One of the things I happily consigned to the weekly trash pickup was a pair of boots that seemed to get heavier as they aged; heavier and less comfortable. Often I have found that work boots grow to be almost a part of you, and when they finally give out it’s like saying goodbye to old friends. That was not the case with these boots and I was not sorry to send them off to fill their little part of the Rhode Island state landfill in Johnston, an ex-farming community west of Providence.
I idly wondered where I would find another pair of workboots, but in the same hectic pack up to leave the north I found a pair of barely used boots stuffed into a plastic bag in a corner of a room. Turns out they were son Zach’s boots and he was getting rid of them because they had never fitted very well. I tried them on and they seemed to work well, so I rescued them from the Salvation Army bag and came south ready (I thought) to go to work.
Go to work we did, almost immediately, and the hand-me-up boots worked fine – for a few days. The first intimation of failure was when grass started getting stuck in the toes. Within a day or two I was starting to trip over the floppy fronts. By the end of the first week it was clear that what I had inherited was nothing less than a pair of crappy tools.
Having another son who had worked as a cobbler for a while, I was familiar with the concept of unrepairable shoes (the bane of serious cobblers). I now found myself standing in an illustration of that concept. It was time to cut my losses. The boots were sent to the rubbish pile where they will soon fill their little corner of the Buncombe County landfill. I got myself off to town to find another pair that split the difference between quality and cost.
Years ago at the start of the SUV craze, I remember reading an article that said that some astronomically high percentage of new SUV owners would never use their 4-wheel-drive – which was a good thing, since the off-road capacity of these minivan replacements was pathetic. They looked like they could do something special, but in fact they couldn’t. I had stepped into a pair of fake workboots that had never been designed or built actually to work.