SNAPPED ELASTIC SYMBOLISM

WHAT QUALITY CONTROL??????

You use an elastic band these days that has been touched by the sun for a few hours and it snaps. To me it's symbolic of the lousy quality control that means everything from your refrigerator to your weed wacker stops working the day after the warranty expires.
I have a regular supply of elastic bands since the newspaper delivery guys use them whenever they don't leave my papers in a puddle or somewhere beyond hailing distance of the porch.
I use the bands to anchor a disabled parking permit in my car. It's a great aid by society to my wife who has trouble walking and I want to make sure the parking vultures see it. I find that two elastics are good for several days if I don't touch them.
I realize that kitchen appliances that used to last forever now blow up after 10 years plus one day. I have come to accept that the computer on which I am typing this seems to be obsolete after a year or two and one sneer from a millennial.
All this bugs me a lot. And thanks to the lousy manufacture of the elastic bands used by the Star and Post, I am reminded regularly of this when a simple elastic band can't stretch in the sun without getting melanoma.

(It also bugs me that there is this evil coalition between the electricity producers and the appliance manufacturers that pump out the propaganda that any device older than a year is a terrible waster of electricity.
You know, almost as much as the smart meters that don't work yet are used to savage me with high bills for an unused cottage.
I inherited a fridge when I bought my house half a century ago (which actually seems just yesterday. ) I used it for 10 years and then it spent several decades as a beer fridge as we bought several replacements which were a lot larger and a lot weaker.)
I know that most Canadian appliances are made by just one company. You would think that with all the practise they would make a better product. They slap different names on them, and the more expensive ones have costlier trim, but are never sturdier for some suspicious reason.
And yet the various provincial and municipal power vultures, which are supposed to care more about the public  than private companies,  encourage us to scrap any old fridge that lasts on the grounds it's a power hog. Well, it takes one to know one!
I remember when an elastic band was sturdy enough to survive a morning of being shot around a public school classroom at any exposed neck, except for the girls of course who tended to tattle when you hit them.
The good old days, when things didn't wear out just after you took them out of the package.