Kjel.org bought a new grill this weekend. The buying process was pretty painless, and I am happy to report that the Beaverton-Hillsboro Hwy Home Depot gets the Kjel.org stamp of approval: the sales woman was exceedingly friendly and seeing that I had the boy with me she took it upon herself to wheel the big heavy box all the way out to the Suby after I’d paid for it. The grill itself? Haven’t used it yet, since it is taking me forever to build the thing. I’m sure the professionals could have the whole unit assembled in 30 minutes, but it took the CEO that long just to get the damn thing out of the box and get all the styrofoam and bubble wrap off.
It’s no so much that it is difficult to put together, it’s just that there are so many pieces; the instruction manual is 27 pages long if that gives you any sense of what I’m looking at here. Plus, everything is attached with tiny (like 5 mm) screws and locking washers and so forth. Maybe that is fine in some countries, but come on, let’s think just a bit about the U.S. market for high-end grills: a lot of the people buying them are going to be, shall we say, big boned. Locking nuts the size of a tic-tac are not that easy for a fat-fingered guy like the CEO to manipulate.
And to top it off, there are in fact three sizes of screws and assorted hardware involved here, but they all look pretty much exactly the same. As I found out repeatedly, they are not. There was a point Sunday where I considered pulling out my hacksaw to fix one of the screws, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned by now it’s to think twice or even three times before I start sawing through things. As it turns out I was looking at a wrong screw, not that the screw itself was in need of repair.
