Why Don’t Engineers Design Appliances to Withstand the Perfectly “Normal” Lifestyle of My Children: Lessons From Little Mr. Sunshine

American products have lost their durable edge! I hope our national effort to Build Back Better returns American products to their mantle of rugged supremacy.  

I recently came home to a dishwasher whose door was mangled and held closed by duct tape. It looked like the machine was hit by a truck, after being dropped from a plane. Hard-earned experience told me my two sons, the dynamic duo, probably had a hand in the act. I hunted down, separated, then interrogated the tykes.  My cross-examination reveled that the seven-year-old boy destroyed the open appliance door while fleeing his four-year-old sibling. The youngest of my legacy was chasing the elder while displaying his frontal private parts, commonly known as “sunning” in my residence.

I couldn’t blame my son for fleeing his celestial tormentor. Escaping another boy’s exposed private parts is no sin and highly recommended. We all know you should never look directly at or get too close to the sun. As for the gaseous globe wielder, I couldn’t blame him either. Unholstering one’s appendage and chasing a sibling is normal 4-year-old boy behavior in many American households, I believe.

Blame obviously belongs on the dishwasher engineers for not anticipating this normal American conduct and designing my appliance to withstand it! In the day, that door would have had steel I-beams with barbed wire edges. If I faceplanted on my dishwasher as a lad, the washer would have laughed off the abuse. My parents would have been able to run a load of dishes while my dad fashioned me a homemade neck brace in his basement workshop.

Another example of bygone product durability is the outdoor playsets of my youth. They were built tough and formed tough young adults. Take the old merry-go-round ride. If you got the right people spinning it, you could attain orbital escape velocity. And if you got chucked off the device, there was no concussion protocol. You just held on to a rusty metal post till the world stopped spinning.

Many of these playsets were so well made, they still stand today. That’s because engineers designed products for ordinary use, like teenagers riding banana seat bicycles down the hot metal slides or a pack of children jumping on a seesaw to launch someone on the other end. That’s common-sense product ruggedness that should still be around today.

Let’s get back to our rugged roots. Overhead light fixtures should be able to take a direct shot from a lacrosse ball. Bicycles should not bend like a baggie tie when run over by a sedan. Stairway balusters should not splinter from the impact of two kids riding a plastic sled down the front hall stairs.

Where has American ingenuity and craftsmanship gone? I’m going to send a stern letter to that customer service department. Where’s my typewriter? I think the kids were using it for a bike ramp.