Our Broken Pushchair Has Not Been Replaced
Our Broken Pushchair Has Not Been Replaced
Our elite push chair is the Silver Cross, the world's best baby stroller, the choice of none other than the British royal family. We bought this British-branded Chinese-made product here in Japan this year, and the last thing we expected was that it would break.
But it did.
The passenger sits in the chair with his or her feet resting on a footstrap, a hefty item which does not suggest the word fragile. Even so, it was this piece of the apparatus which broke, fracturing without warning, leaving daughter Cornucopia with no place to put her feet.
My wife got on to the people who sell this item in Japan, and they agreed that the problem would be remedied, so a courier uplifted the chair on a Wednesday evening, with the promise that it would be back on the Friday.
It was not back, and we did not see it until Monday 21 May, which was grossly inconvenient. Cornucopia having decided she wanted to go to the Olympic home center to play with the selection of goods in the toy section, we went. That is to say, I went together with her. She then decided she was too tired to walk home, so had to be carried.
The weather here in Japan is getting hot, and it's a solid walk home home, a good twenty minutes, two kilometers, which is a long way if you have a three-year-old infant to carry in your arms.
During the time in which the push chair was away, I entertained a ridiculous fantasy, and imagined that perhaps, instead of being merely repaired, it would be replaced by a brand new stroller.
What put this aberrant thought into my mind was the behavior of Canon, the Japanese electronics company. When our very old digital camera broke this year, after much use, Canon amazed us by replacing it with a brand new IXY 800, a very nice camera which I plan to review, once I've finally had time to sit down and figure out the ins and outs of how it works.
Because my replacement fantasy was shamefully childish, I said nothing of it to my wife.
When our push chair was finally returned, my wife observed that it was exactly the same chair rather than a replacement. She knew this because it was emblazoned with the name tag my wife had earlier affixed to it, a tag proudly proclaiming my daughter's name to the world: AIKO CORNUCOPIA BOADICEA NISHIKAWA.
(A great name, though I have started to think that if my daughter ever wants to follow in the footsteps of Paris Hilton and become a brand, then perhaps a slightly shorter name would have been commercially advantageous.)
My wife then said that she had been thinking that perhaps the push chair people might do a Canon and give us an entirely new product. So I confessed that I had been entertaining exactly the same notion.
I was amused at how both of us had been influenced in the direction of unrealistic expectations by a single example of Canonic behavior which both of us knew to be not commercially normative. There is a lesson about human nature in this, I'm sure, but for the life of me I can't figure it out.
Tuesday, we went to and from the daycare with our war car, as per usual. Returning home from the daycare on the evening of Tuesday 22 May, I restored my cooking confidence by cooking up exactly the same meal as the one which had led to my earlier near-disaster in the kitchen. Only this time I decided not to fry the sausages for taste. I decided that the pleasure of having your boiled sausages fried is not worth the risk of accidentally frying yourself alive.
Footnote: for some reason my Blogger blog switched its language from English to Japanese, presumably because my Internet service provider is in Japan. This grossly inconvenienced me, and forced me to start opening a couple of Japanese dictionaries which I hadn't touched in years. However, when I logged on this evening, Tuesday 22 May 2007, I found that the language on the site was back to English once again. I don't know if this change is temporary or permanent.
One thing I couldn't figure out through the fog of Japanese was how I was supposed to upload my photos, as the procedure seemed to have changed when Blogger switched me to Japanese, so the remembered link did not seem to be in the same place. If I can get photo uploads going again, then our new IXY 800 will yield fresh images to the waiting world.
Our elite push chair is the Silver Cross, the world's best baby stroller, the choice of none other than the British royal family. We bought this British-branded Chinese-made product here in Japan this year, and the last thing we expected was that it would break.
But it did.
The passenger sits in the chair with his or her feet resting on a footstrap, a hefty item which does not suggest the word fragile. Even so, it was this piece of the apparatus which broke, fracturing without warning, leaving daughter Cornucopia with no place to put her feet.
My wife got on to the people who sell this item in Japan, and they agreed that the problem would be remedied, so a courier uplifted the chair on a Wednesday evening, with the promise that it would be back on the Friday.
It was not back, and we did not see it until Monday 21 May, which was grossly inconvenient. Cornucopia having decided she wanted to go to the Olympic home center to play with the selection of goods in the toy section, we went. That is to say, I went together with her. She then decided she was too tired to walk home, so had to be carried.
The weather here in Japan is getting hot, and it's a solid walk home home, a good twenty minutes, two kilometers, which is a long way if you have a three-year-old infant to carry in your arms.
During the time in which the push chair was away, I entertained a ridiculous fantasy, and imagined that perhaps, instead of being merely repaired, it would be replaced by a brand new stroller.
What put this aberrant thought into my mind was the behavior of Canon, the Japanese electronics company. When our very old digital camera broke this year, after much use, Canon amazed us by replacing it with a brand new IXY 800, a very nice camera which I plan to review, once I've finally had time to sit down and figure out the ins and outs of how it works.
Because my replacement fantasy was shamefully childish, I said nothing of it to my wife.
When our push chair was finally returned, my wife observed that it was exactly the same chair rather than a replacement. She knew this because it was emblazoned with the name tag my wife had earlier affixed to it, a tag proudly proclaiming my daughter's name to the world: AIKO CORNUCOPIA BOADICEA NISHIKAWA.
(A great name, though I have started to think that if my daughter ever wants to follow in the footsteps of Paris Hilton and become a brand, then perhaps a slightly shorter name would have been commercially advantageous.)
My wife then said that she had been thinking that perhaps the push chair people might do a Canon and give us an entirely new product. So I confessed that I had been entertaining exactly the same notion.
I was amused at how both of us had been influenced in the direction of unrealistic expectations by a single example of Canonic behavior which both of us knew to be not commercially normative. There is a lesson about human nature in this, I'm sure, but for the life of me I can't figure it out.
Tuesday, we went to and from the daycare with our war car, as per usual. Returning home from the daycare on the evening of Tuesday 22 May, I restored my cooking confidence by cooking up exactly the same meal as the one which had led to my earlier near-disaster in the kitchen. Only this time I decided not to fry the sausages for taste. I decided that the pleasure of having your boiled sausages fried is not worth the risk of accidentally frying yourself alive.
Footnote: for some reason my Blogger blog switched its language from English to Japanese, presumably because my Internet service provider is in Japan. This grossly inconvenienced me, and forced me to start opening a couple of Japanese dictionaries which I hadn't touched in years. However, when I logged on this evening, Tuesday 22 May 2007, I found that the language on the site was back to English once again. I don't know if this change is temporary or permanent.
One thing I couldn't figure out through the fog of Japanese was how I was supposed to upload my photos, as the procedure seemed to have changed when Blogger switched me to Japanese, so the remembered link did not seem to be in the same place. If I can get photo uploads going again, then our new IXY 800 will yield fresh images to the waiting world.
posted by Hugh Cook at 11:16 PM
1 Comments:
http://altavista.com/babelfish has a service which will dynamically translate pages between languages, including the pages linked to from that page.
It might be useful in a pinch.
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