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The other day I went to attach some junk to a wall in the shed, and I found the stuff I was looking for -- a roll of pipe-hanger strap.
For those of you who suffer from blue-collar wisdom deprivation, pipe-hanger strap, available in any good hardware store, comes in rolls of thin pliable metal, about an inch wide, perforated with quarter-inch holes at frequent intervals.
Only once have I seen pipe-hanger strap, which has at least 1,381 uses, ranging from reinforcing wooden boxes to jiggling floppy disks out of drives when they're stuck, actually used to hang pipes.
In the spring of 1973, when I was the day-shift washman and we were moving some steam pipes at the Model Laundry in Longmont, the guy on top of the ladder called for a roll of strap, and applied it for its designated purpose.
He was a minister whose church was too small to support him as a full-time preacher, so maybe that explains why he followed the book. The rest of us always used baling wire to hang pipes, since pipe-hanger strap was far too useful for other purposes to waste on holding pipes in place.
As for baling wire, I have used it to repair both wire and wooden fences, adjust carburetors, fabricate trellises, hold gates shut, clamp hoses, ground computer chassis, form bucket handles and improve radio reception.
But I have never used it to bale hay. For that matter, all the hay I can recall was baled with twine, not wire. On farms and ranches, baling wire must be like pipe-hanger strap in a laundry -- much too functional to squander on its intended purpose.
This applies around the house, too. Who ever uses baking soda for baking? It's good for general cleaning and removing odors, and it tastes better than toothpaste for oral hygiene. It helps for heartburn and bee stings, too. But baking?
Duct tape is so seldom used on heating ducts that most
people mispronounce it duck tape
as they use it to
mend parkas and sheathe short cables. I came close to using
it on a duct once; back when Colorado had an inspection law
and I had a hole in a muffler, the duct-tape patch job --
spray-painted black along with the old muffler -- held long
enough to fool the mechanic into issuing the sticker. No
household can afford to be without it.
According to one recent survey, only one paper clip in 20 ever gets used to clip paper. The other 19 clean fingernails and coffeepots, hang pictures and jam vacuum cleaners -- where they're often also employed to pry the offending debris out of the intake brushes and rollers.
This misuse isn't anything new. The telephone is now used for person-to-person communication, but the original idea was for a group of people to hear a distant concert.
That is, the telephone was supposed to function the way radio does now, and radio, of course, was supposed to serve for private conversations between two people -- that was the plan when its pioneers were experimenting with triodes and heterodynes.
Other giant industries have arisen from misuse. Since they run so slowly past the recording head, cassette tapes were never meant to handle music -- just voices, whose frequency range is much smaller. Naturally the eight-track tape, designed for music, is deader than Confederate money even as the music industry grows exponentially.
Watch the Winter Olympics, and you'll see that team uniforms, originally designed to protect and identify the athletes during competition, now serve as mobile billboards for multi-national corporations. You'll also observe that television, designed to bring culture and information to the public, now devotes most of its energy to telling us where Michael Jackson might be renting a room.
Some may see all this misapplication of consumer products as one of the glories of American ingenuity -- we're creative people who devise innovative uses for whatever we have at hand.
But apparently those days are in the past. Many new
products now carry this caveat: It is a violation
Federal law to use this product in a manner inconsistent
with its labeling.
So don't try to think for yourself and find a new use for a familiar product. It's against the law, and the Feds will be at your door.
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