Am I complaining about first world problems?
Why yes... Yes I am.
I refer back to Peggy Lee's song, "Is That All There Is?"
https://youtu.be/eMsXjKBZM74
Just to be clear, none of this is the fault of Jinbao/Wessex.
If I had to guess where the blame should fall, I probably would guess that it's the fault of single parent homes and/or male parents who weren't allowed to grow up in a 3D world, nor run freely throughout their neighborhoods and get into mischief, nor be allowed to make their own mistakes nor be scolded by their own dads when they did their own dumb stuff, or - when growing up - were never required to pay the consequences for doing something stupid (after having already done the same stupid thing and having been warned off of it). It's one thing to mess with virtual 3D, and it's infinitely more of a learning experience to actually work - and make serious learning errors - in real 3D.
Believe it or not, we (ignorant southern boys who grew up in lower working class neighborhoods) never broke one brace on one tuba nor on one sousaphone nor folded any mouthpipes or lower mouthpipes over on any of those instruments either.. additionally, we never put any dents in our instruments... none. Had any of us done so, we would have received a pretty hard whipping and would have been required to pay for the repairs.
My Dad and my 13 years older brother built a shed with electricity and a window fan and an overhead shelf of scrap wood out in the rear portion of our backyard. By the time I was 7 years old, I was expected to do some of my own repairs on my bicycle, I was allowed to use any hand tool that didn't plug into the wall, and cut up any of the scrap wood that I could get down from that really high shelf (hopefully, without having it all fall on me and kill me).
Additionally (referring to a previous paragraph) by the time I was in the third or fourth grade, my mother never knew where the hell I was, but - if I wasn't home by the time the street lights came on - I was in pretty serious trouble. (By the time I was in the 12th grade, that stretched out to 1: 00 a.m. or so, but usually I was upstairs working on expanding and memorizing solo guitar repertoire.)
Check out this neck for this shoulder-mounted contra:
The last time they wadded it up into a little ball, I straightened it all out and put this nickel-brass overpart tube on it in order to make that portion of it indestructible...so what did they then decide to do?
They made it a point to tear up the rest of it.
Now, look at the outer slide tube into which the neck is inserted. They didn't stop when they busted one of these brace feet off; they made sure that they busted all three.
All I can do is to either arithmetically or geometrically bump up my fee for repairing the same stuff over and over on the same instruments, but it still doesn't offer me any pleasure to where there's any real feeling of accomplishment (some may not believe this, but I'm really not all that interested in money all that much, as long as I can pay my bills and have enough extra to not worry too much at night when I'm trying to sleep), and - as the Fed continues to devalue our dollars - I'm not even really charging any more each time I charge more dollars.
Oh well...
Like I said, this isn't going to be that hard to fix, and -for the principal of the thing - I'm going to charge them punitive money for fixing it yet again.
I'm just really really tired of STUPID.
Attempting to be more philosophical, at least I don't have to haul muddy water from a plastic garbage filled river a mile or so to my hut.
