The Tale of the Toaster

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present for your pleasure a story of good versus evil, an epic tale of adversity and the struggles against oppression. 
I call this story
 
The tale of the Toaster.
 
It began innocently enough in late December in that time shortly after Christmas when all the stores in Costa Rica are empty of sale able goods.  After looking in four or five stores for the object of my desires I finally found what I needed in Liberia, the city a mere hour and a half away.  Miraculously they had the object I sought, a double toaster.
 
Not a single toaster for that would not do for the job at hand.  We needed to make toast for the restaurant for breakfast and only a double toaster, white shiny and clean could possibly help us now.  Our last one had broken and we were having to toast bread on the grill.

I placed my order and waited patiently for the only one in the store (the demonstration model) to be boxed and delivered for me.  This was done in record Costa Rica time, about 25 minutes while my family sat in the car outside and ran the motor and the AC.  And for a mere $50 I walked out half an hour later toaster in hand ready to make toast.  Toast, not a difficult thing, not a complicated process.  Slightly burning bread on both sides in order to enhance the experience has been done since people had bread and a fire, it should not be that hard.  It should not.  This I have told myself many many times.
 
I believe the level of a society could be accurately measured by how toast is made.  Slipping back to doing it on the grill was definitely a regression but now we were equipped with one white, household, black and decker, double toaster.  FOR FIFTY DOLLARS.  Knowing I could get the equivalent at Walmart for $7 if I was in the United States assured me I was in a third world country.  I delivered it to the kitchen and went back to my life without a second thought as to how one toaster can alter the universe.
 
Two weeks later I went into the kitchen, put in the bread, pushed down the button and nothing.  The toast sprang back up, the toaster wouldn't toast on one side of the toaster.  Two weeks!  Two weeks it had taken.  I boxed up my still pretty white toaster and drove to the nearest store, 1 hour on a bad dirt road away in Santa Cruz.
 
And there I presented the toaster, the receipt the evidence of my purchase. I was told by the thin and relatively tall Tico boy in the uniform of the store that they would have to send it in for repairs.  For my toaster he gave me a copy of the receipt and on it he wrote "In for repairs" and signed it.
 
I walked through the aisles and found the my $50 toaster was now selling for $40.  I walked out resigned and prepared to return 2 weeks later when they said my toaster would be ready.
 
Two weeks later I returned and was told my toaster wasn't ready yet.
 
Two weeks after that I returned and was told my toaster wasn't ready yet.
 
Two weeks after that I returned and was told my toaster wasn't ready yet.
 
Are you starting to see a pattern here.
 
Two weeks later I returned and was told that they couldn't repair my toaster.
 
Well of course not. Now I understand something of toaster repair.  Back in the days when I was young and lived in New Zealand my grandfather was a specialist toaster repairer.  Toasters were expensive and New Zealand as a society had not yet reached the level of development that there were two toasters in every house and you could throw one out if it broke.  No toasters were expensive and in my house there were four, one that worked and the other three which were nothing but skeletons kept to take parts from for the one working toaster.

When we went to the beach house there were no such modern conveniences, the toaster there was a four sided metal frame where four pieces of bread were leaned together over a stove element and when smoke issued from one side (or preferably just before) the bread was turned over manually much to the chagrin of your scorched fingers.

Toasters are simple devices, two elements per piece of bread, made up of small wires that get hot when electricity is sent through them.  They heat unless the wire is broken in some place.  Then two spring loaded bread holders connected to a basic timer.  Nothing to it really.  I just had a broken spring, of course they couldn't fix it.  Modern toasters are not made to be fixed, like everything else in our disposable culture they are made to cost $7 and be thrown in one of the man-made wastelands we call trash dumps.
 
However this was good news.  They couldn't repair it.  They would give me a new toaster.  This was great news.  The last four items I'd bought, then brought back to be repaired had been returned to me after the repair still not functioning.  They didn't know how to repair anything, and nothing was made to be repaired anyway.  I would have a new toaster!!!
 
As soon as I gave them the receipt.
 
I didn't have it on me.  I drove home.
 
Two weeks later I was in Santa Cruz papers in hand.  I went and sat for an hour while the man who was supposed to be back from lunch at one showed up at 2:30.  I sat while he looked at my papers. 
 
His muchacho started to box up my new toaster.  I could smell the blackened bread already. But no.
 
Like any good story just when the hero looks like he's going to get the prize something must happen.  For Odysseus it was the storm, then he was attacked, then there were the lotus flowers, the cyclops, then he lost his wind, then the giants attacked them, then Circe kept him for a year, then they had to travel to Hades, then the Sirens tried to sing them to death, then the monster and the whirlpool, then they killed the sun god's cattle and Zeus zapped the ship, then Calypso kept him as her lover for seven years (first Circe then Calypso, he must have been a hottie).  Of course Odysseus was only trying to get home, I was trying to do something much more difficult I was attempting to make cold bread warm, slightly crunchy and do it four slices at a time.
 
I was told by the man now cast as the villain of this melodrama, Edwin, that I needed the Original receipt. 
 
To which I responded but you took it when I turned in the toaster.
 
He responded that he needed the original.
 
I pointed to the signature on the photocopy.  "This is one of your employees" I said.
 
He walked off to ask the other guy whose signature it was.
 
Guy 2, the comic relief for want of someone else said "I don't know."
 
Edwin proceeded to tell me that None of his employees had signed the paper, that I was trying to defraud them.
 
FOR A TOASTER?
 
Mr Comic Relief now walked over, opened the repair book, found my toaster, found the same signature on the sheet saying they had received the toaster.  Now if that isn't funny I don't know what is.

I asked Edwin as politely as I could to give me a new toaster, that the paper said he had it, that I did not have the original receipt that I had swapped it for this signed photocopy.
 
Edwin told me he wouldn't.
 
I told him to give me back my broken toaster.
 
He said he couldn't.
 
I started to yell in Spanish.  This was a first for me.
 
I screamed for him to write down his name, the name of his boss and the number of the head office. 
 
He did and I drove back home another hour.
 
Back at my office my manager rang the head office and was told that since the name of my company rather than me was on the receipt I would have to to back to Santa Cruz with the legal documents of my corporation proving I was in charge of the corporation.
 
Well yeah obviously, I had only been five times to collect my toaster.  Of course they didn't know me, I mean who was I really?
 
I arrived at 11:30 to be told the man I had to speak to, Edwin the dark and evil villain was in fact at lunch and would be back by about 2:30.  At least they were honest about that this time. After all the first time they had told me he would be back from lunch any minute, that's why I'd sat for an hour in front of his desk waiting for him.
 
To note by looking at his desk you would never think that he was in league with the devil, there is nothing to indicate it, just the usual Catholic prayer poster, a computer, a pile of papers, files, no pens evident.  One would think the anti-christ would have a more interesting desk, but no. At least Circe and the Sirens were beautiful... but the bland looking man I was supposed to wait for again was nothing much to look at.
 
I told his staff that this was craziness, that I wanted my toaster back, that they had stolen it from me.  I couldn't wait, literally couldn't, I had to collect my kids from school at 3 and it was an hour drive home.
 
So I left.  Without toaster, without hope.
 
I may return.  It took Odysseus 10 years but I'm not sure I will. Did I triumph?  No, evil won but why not after all it's only a fucking toaster.