WHERE THERE'S A WILL, THERE'S A GRILL
There are times in your life when you realize that you have grown and matured in small but meaningful
ways. For many of us these wondrous moments come when we have cleared huge obstacles,
slayed personal demons or have graduated, been promoted, been married or become a parent.
Usually a ceremony of some sort often marks the occasion.
My recent moment of maturity came when helping my sister assemble a gas grill. I didn't get a ceremony,
I only received a couple of leftover screws and a big empty box. But I felt fulfilled.
I didn't feel satisfied just because we successfully assembled a device that could potentially blow us up.
I felt mature from this experience because not once during the labored process of assembly did I
utter a single naughty word. I never swore. Not once. And I swear by it.
Now, my sister, on the other hand, unveiled a shamful display of udder maddness.
I can't be sure but I may have even seen her head spin around once or twice.
Ok, to be fair, I did get a little huffy when I couldn't locate the "English" version of the instructions,
(turned the manual over, around, then upside down, two pages past the
children's drawings, I mean diagrams...And there they were)
But I never got mad at the grill, okay? I calmly and methodically put it together,
and if you have ever assembled a gas grill, you know how difficult this can be.
It's not that gas grills are highly complex. They're highly flammable, but they're really quite simple.
Some pipes take the gas out of the tank and, once you have a spark, a raging inferno
ensues that, hopefully, cooks the chicken parts all the way through. Then you sit back
and drink Ice-tea and revel in what a great woman you are.
That's in the instructions also.
Actually, there isn't much in the instructions and therein lies the chief problem. Although gas grills
are fairly simple devices, they come in about a thousand parts, most of which you have never seen
before. The instructions identify about five of these parts. There are also a lot of different types
of screws, which the instructions also fail to identify.
Furthermore, the instructions only tell you what parts you will need for each section, such as the frame,
the control panel, the side burner, the nuclear missile launcher... stuff like that. As a result,
you can never line up the thousand parts to see if you have any missing,
in which case you could pack up the box and light it on fire the old-fashioned way.
No, you have to forge ahead, bravely assembling things with mystery screws that once you tighten,
you know you will never get out again. At this point, there is no turning back.
Gas grill instructions also have lousy diagrams. These grill companies must not pay their artists very well, because these guys can't draw. You've got to look at the drawings from several different angles,
then attempt to assemble the parts, realizing at some point that the directions instructed you to
assemble them backwards. Here again, it's not so much the assembly of the grill that
takes a long time, it's figuring out the directions.
Then, by the time you reach the end of your carefully assembled time bomb, you find that you
have leftover parts. This is most disconcerting, because these parts appeared no where in the
instructions. There weren't even bad drawings of these parts. After inspecting your precious creation
and realizing you could not have possibly done anything wrong, you utter,
"Oh well, I guess I won't be needing these. ... Let's fire it up."
Unfortunately, it was too late in the night when we were done to test our creation.
The next day I just had to cook on the new gas grill. I had to try it out, even if we didn't have
much of anything to cook on it. So after first calling to request the fire department be on stand-by ..
and with extinguisher in hand ...we fired it up....It worked, thankfully, and we ate
hamburgers and hot dogs. I was like a little kid. And who could blame me?
After all, I had matured.
until next time
- Kim Gallagher-
