With Uncle Ed on a Rainy Day

Recently an article appeared in a major newspaper that sug­gests our focus needs to shift from cost to quality. The authors point to fiascos such as the Big Dig’s collapsing ceilings, the rup­tured

pipe caused by a clamp failure that in turn caused the MWRA water crisis of last week, the crumbling cement railway ties on the Old Colony Railway that were installed in lieu of wooden ones that were guaranteed for fifty years and are crumbling after only thir­teen,

and of course the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The authors forgot to mention the plethora of leaks still being experienced in the Big Dig tunnels, also.

I couldn’t agree with the authors more. We lost our striving for excellence in the 1980s when we adopted a “good enough” phi­losophy. I remember buying equipment for projects I was sell­ing and having engineers and users tell me never mind supply­ing Asco solenoid valves (the standard of the industry). Use these knock-offs for half price, they said. They’re good enough. In actual practice the users install this stuff, the knock-offs fail in a couple of years, and they replace them with the appropriate Asco units that should have been used in the first place. A perfect example of false economy.

You don’t need to go to the industrial market or major infra­structure projects to discover the problem, though. Just look at our own everyday lives. Look at men’s shoes, underwear, socks, and sweatshirts. It’s all cheap crap. I bought six T-shirts recently. In a cost-saving move the maker eliminated the labels so I never know if I’m putting them on frontward or backwards. It’s a bloody 50-50 crapshoot every day. Lead pencils from offshore are pure junk compared to the good old USA pencils we used to get and so are the cheap pens we’re forced to use.

The final example I’ll offer up is my new lawn mower. The sec­ond time I used it I bent the blade, rendering the machine useless. Obviously they’re using crummy steel now because in talking to a landscaper he told me he replaces them all the time. He swears they’re made of cardboard.

When I was selling I sold quality, top-of-the-line, engineered industrial control equipment and valving. I created the “Crane Manifesto” many years ago, and this became my main selling thrust, and it’s as true today as it was thirty-plus years ago. Here it is:

It is false economy to buy the cheapest article for sale, as many corners were cut to enable the maker to sell it so cheaply. There will be problems due to the lack of quality that will either require costly repairs or will result in a premature failure of the product in question. You would be much better off buying a quality product in the first place because it will hold up better and provide a longer service life and end up being less expensive in the long run.

Truth-in-writing disclosure: If there are any fans of 19th cen­tury social critic John Bayard Rustin among you, and you have studied his writings, you may notice he and I arrived at similar conclusions, and I borrowed, somewhat, a fair amount of his thinking.

I think it’s also fair to observe that Rustin was a bit of a ras­cal, enjoying his fair share of adult beverages, that he was also a compulsive womanizer and he ended up stark-raving mad in an insane asylum at a fairly young age. My dear wife of thirty-nine years feels relatively certain that I may be careening in a similar direction also, but that’s another story.

Changing gears, Time and Newsweek cannot possibly go out of business fast enough to suit me. The latest outrage is Time’s special May 10 issue of the 100 most influential people in the world. On the cover is Lady Gaga encased in sort of a bailing wire brassiere and on the inside she is profiledby that most respected social critic, Cyndi Lauper. This is journalistic malpractice at its zenith.

Following up on last week’s story about the murder of fifteen-year-old James Alensen by then-sixteen-year-old John Odgren, I have some advice for our Governor Deval Patrick. Now I am not in the habit of advising Democratic politicians on their next and wisest moves, but since our Governor oftentimes adopts the “deer in the headlights” look and behavior, and in the interest of fair play, I thought I might offer him a suggestion for the benefit of all involved: Get involved in this mess, take the lad out of the standard prison system and put him in a psychiatric prison fa­cility, not only for evaluation, but also to serve his life term for murder. Show some resolve and some backbone. Lose the wishy-washy act! Now just to show what a good guy I am, here’s some advice for the G.O.P. candidate, Charley Baker. Lose the idea of being a stealth candidate and “man-up” in the Scott Brown manner. Let’s have a “contract with Massachusetts” type manifesto with bold plans and strong stands on issues. Show us some color, some swagger, some muscle. Your candidacy to date has been as excit­ing as a lump of wallpaper paste, your style has been bland and totally without any zest or zip. Those talking points you issued were total pablum. This is your election to lose, and if you’re not going to go for this aggressively and with purpose you will in fact lose it. Now get on with it! Finally, I went over to the Natick Mall a couple of days ago. A cheap lunch is to walk up and down the food court eating the free samples they hand out. I got five pieces of chicken, with the spicy stuff from the Thai joint being the best. Also, I noticed a lot of up-to-date and fashionable women wearing shoes that look and sound as if they were designed for wear by Clydesdales. Feminine they’re not.