the can-opener effect

Hello there!

About two months ago we moved out of the horrible burbs of L'viv, to a flat in a much nicer, more central part of town. During the settling-in process, I was confronted with a classic example of something that has always fascinated me about ex-Soviet republics: namely, the sheer number of physical, functional items here that simply don’t do the rather straightforward tasks they’re designed for.

Let me explain: our new flat has a bath with a typical 'European-style' fixture*. The hot and cold taps are mounted on a sturdy metal frame, and a shower head is attached. The head is connected to the frame by a kind of cable, made of little interlocking metal rings that flex like a rubber pipe.

This standard Euro-shower ensemble also includes one extra part – a plastic ring attached high up on the wall, into which you can put the shower head for a 'hands-free' wash. Of course, the principle here is one of choice. When you're in the mood for simply relaxing under a stream of hot water for 10 minutes, warming your muscles on a cold morning and splashing a bit of soap around for a general clean, you can go hands-free. But when your mission is a more thorough and/or site-specific one, you unhook, grab the shower head and manouevre it by hand, ensuring optimal  washage of the requisite body parts.

All of this is fine and groovy, except for one thing: this kind of fixture is also common in Ukraine now, but builders here haven’t quite got their heads around the "dual option" concept yet. When installing a Euro-shower, they do strange things with the little plastic ring. Most commonly, they either throw it away (judging by its absence from many bathrooms), or they attach it so low down on the wall that you couldn’t possibly stand under it without amputating your entire body up to the chest.

This may result in some degree of frustration if, like me, you're passionate about your morning showers and you prefer them to be relaxing (as opposed to being an exercise in fine-grained manual dexterity). It means that, whilst you've very nearly got a functioning shower, what you actually have is just a fancy hose for cleaning the bath.

Even better than that, however, is the shower in our new flat. In accordance with Ukrainian tradition, the plastic ring is affixed to the wall about two feet off the ground, for that classic “Gee, this looks like it would be perfect for the children of two particularly diminutive dwarves” effect. But when you try to put the shower head into the wall-fitting, you make a very interesting discovery: namely, that the fitting is designed in such a way that it simply cannot work.

You should be able to see what I mean (I think) in the photo here. As I mentioned, the head is attached to a metal cable, and the length of cable that inevitably sticks out horizontally behind the plastic ring is greater than the distance between the ring and the wall fixture. This means that there’s no way you can actually get a shower head into it – I mean, just no way at all. And this isn't a consequence of poor installation: it results from the inherently stupid nature of the thing itself.

This is just the latest in a long stream of dysfunctional products I've encountered in the former USSR, and especially in Ukraine. There are corkscrews so flimsy that they successfully open less than one bottle of wine in their lifetimes; matches whose heads melt together in humid weather, so that when you open the matchbox you're greeted by the sight of 50 cranially-conjoined wooden siblings; washing machines with a cycle of well over two hours (some of which leap wildly around the room as they wash, providing free entertainment for the flat's occupants); staplers that can staple a maximum of two pages; soap that doesn't lather, but rather streaks onto your skin then blocks your plug hole; ovens that require you to stand for about three minutes forcibly holding down a button while they drum up the courage to work all by themselves ... and on the list goes.

But why, you may ask, am I telling you all of this, and why in so much detail? Well, fair question. Before I answer it, though, I hope you'll bear with me a little longer, because there is a point ... and I mean one that goes beyond the general desire to complain or a tendency to find ineptitude and bad design quite funny.

See, as I mentioned at the start, these kinds of self-defeating 'conveniences' genuinely intrigue me. To illustrate why, I want to tell you about one specific useless household product which I've come across several times in different places, and which seems to me somehow 'iconic'.

So ... ready for some more domestic minutiae?

Ok, here we go.

In Russia and Kazakhstan, one kind of product that’s almost guaranteed not to do what it should is the humble can opener. I’m not thinking here of the old-fashioned type with the blade which you jab violently into the top of the can. (I actually prefer those nowadays – they’re so satisfying to use!) I’m talking about the ones with a key on top, which you calmly turn a couple of dozen times, until your flakes of tuna are freed from their cruel incarceration.

You can get super-modern versions of these key-style openers in Russia and KZ, but you generally have to go to a glitzy chain supermarket like Ramstor to find them, and they cost an arm and a leg and a firstborn child (although admittedly, if you bring someone else's firstborn, you'll rarely be asked to show proof of its identity).

(A side-note here: while I find the actual shops themselves mildly annoying, I think Ramstor must be the coolest name for a supermarket chain in the known universe. Every time I say, hear or even think the word, I get Rammstein vocalist Till Lindemann in my head, singing something like this:

Rammmm Stor-r-r-r-r,
What a terrible chor-r-r-r-r-r-e!
Ich muss zum Superrrrmarkt jetzt laufen,
und dort machen die Einkaufen
r-r-Rammmstor-r-r-r-!!!

und so fort.)

Sorry; back to the almost-having-a-point.

So you can go to r-r-r-RAMMMMstor-r-r if you want to, and spend almost $10 on a slick and shiny Western-looking can-opener with sexy contoured plastic bits. But y’know, most English teachers are on a fairly modest salary, so they tend to just buy the basic model at their local shop. Which they then take home and try to use.

This is generally the moment when they discover that turning the key will cause it to immediately break off, leaving the tuna flakes imprisoned inside their mini-Bastille. And if they were to go and buy a replacement can opener of the same type, they'd find there's about a 70% chance that the exact same thing would happen again.

So it's “Hello!” to another product which, by its nature, completely and spectacularly fails to fulfil its one and only purpose.

Here's the thing, though: one night in late-2007 or early-2008, I was with Scott in our flat in Almaty, and we experienced the ‘can opener effect’ for ourselves (though not for the first time in my case). We brought a new opener home from the local 24hr supermarket, stuck it on top of a can of something, turned it once, and watched in dismay as the metal key bent like toffee and the can fell to the floor. And right then, the following thought (or something very much like it) flashed through my tiny eggshell mind:

“Oh holy crap … imagine being the person who made that! I mean, imagine – imaaagine – that assembling these useless bits of domestic detritus on some horrible factory floor in China was your regular source of income, the means by which you fed and clothed your family, the thing you called your ‘career’. How would that feel?”

This thought has stayed with me ever since.

I personally find it somewhat mind-blowing, for a couple of reasons. First, on the happy-clappy, sunnily-disposed side, it does seems to offer a little perspective on whatever issues you may be having with your own job at any given time. And ridiculous though this may seem, I have actually put it to constructive use. There have been a couple of occasions when I’ve been stressed out and/or pissed off with one or other aspect of teaching, and I've just taken a moment to compare my frustrations with the plight of Mr Crappy Can Opener Guy.

The comparison does tend to be somewhat comforting :-)

On the other, less positively-spun side of things, it’s just incredible to me that these utterly useless objects are the focus of someone’s daily work routine. The people who make them, I'd argue, should be numbered among the unsung victims of globalisation.

I mean, we all know about lethal factory fires in Asia, appalling conditions in sweatshops, workforce lockdowns, and all that terrible stuff. And it is terrible, without question. But what about the person who knows for a near-certainty that, at the end of their professional life, they’ll be looking back on 40-plus years of labouring every day to make metal and/or plastic gizmos which get loaded onto a truck, make their way out into the world and either

a) fall to pieces immediately upon being purchased; or
b) simply don't work?

Isn’t that, in a way, the ultimate in postmodern existential angst?

So yeah ... since first having this thought, when things fall to pieces in my hands I often react quite differently than I used to. The "Damn stupid corkscrew!" response is far less common nowadays, and a "The people who made this thing must be out of their minds with despair!" train of thought is fairly dominant. And as I said above, the can-opener has become my personal icon for these people.

Btw, one notable exception to everything I've just said is computer software. I still swear at it regularly and loudly, wishing horrible diseases upon the testicles of its creators. Maybe that's because I know many of them should be in the Existential Hell of Dysfunctional Manufacture, but they're not. Smug bastards are making more cash than a lot of us who are actually doing something vaguely useful.

That aside, I would like to dedicate this entry, and the several glasses of wine which have accompanied it, to the Fall-Apart Can-Opener People – those humble working class folk whose efforts to feed their families result in former Soviet citizens (and no doubt many others) being deluged with stuff they can't use, in the service of economic progress. I hope they know there's at least one crackpot out there thinking of them!

Bye )))



* I call this a 'European-style' shower because I've seen a lot of them in Europe and none anywhere else.