A “first-planet problem,” defined: “A relatively trivial or minimal issue or disappointment (implying a contrast with significant problems such as people that may be professional in the producing world).”
But you now know the definition, do not you? I know I do. For most of us, if we’re sincere with ourselves, our days are loaded with complaints about very first-world challenges. We just pile them up in heaps, a single on prime of a different.
Our garage fridge died, and it crippled our really existence. Brought us to our knees.
Is that not the epitome, the complete pinnacle of a initial-entire world problem? You have so significantly scrumptious food stuff and delicious drinks in your fridge and freezer positioned in your kitchen that you have to have a spare appliance in your garage for your overflow stock.
It’s a tragedy that the late, fantastic comic George Carlin is not alive to get in all of this…what we’ve come to be with our mountains of “stuff.” A person of Carlin’s priceless, and it turns out, timeless bits was about people and their “stuff” and how they retain owning to find a lot more sites to put all of their stuff, for the reason that they have to have “more stuff.” He ranted on our obsession with accumulating “stuff” additional than 40 decades in the past. If Carlin ended up all around nowadays and noticed all of these large quonsets on back-lots at the lakes and all of our sheds and our triple-stall garages and all of the storage-unit complexes dotting our landscape like pimples on a teenager…well, it would probably eliminate him.
I insist on calling it our garage fridge. Everybody else looks to have no challenge contacting it a “beer fridge,” but I discover I’m wracked with less guilt and shame if I refer to our fridge by wherever it’s located and not by what normally fills its best shelf.
My spouse a pair of weeks in the past came upstairs with a pair of chilly ones, but, she noted, they weren’t that cold. Right away, my blood coursed by means of my physique at absolute zero.
I rapidly went downstairs and into the garage to investigate. The fridge door was sometimes a little bit disagreeable. Had it been still left open up slightly for a sizeable total of time? Not likely. I opened the door to continue my probe. The temperature dial was established on “Coldest” as I generally insisted it be, adequate to freeze any non-alcoholic beverage if remaining on the major shelf for as well extensive.
Achieving the restrictions of my appliance-fix experience more quickly than it takes a human to blink, I did what every person faced with a glitchy, malfunctioning device does these days: I unplugged it for 10 seconds and plugged it again in, to no avail. This was not a wi-fi modem, after all.
The fridge was “running” due to the fact I could listen to its telltale hum, but it was not functioning. A few hrs later my spouse verified that our quite survival was on the brink when she went to get some venison sausage from the garage fridge’s freezer and noticed items were starting up to thaw. Excellent detail we experienced a however-thoroughly-operating chest freezer appropriate upcoming to the fridge to transfer points to, but it was a limited in shape, squeezing anything from the fridge’s freezer in there. (See what I necessarily mean about very first-world challenges multiplying?)
This was on a Saturday, mid-afternoon. I was surfing for fridges 10 minutes afterwards and actually considered that I could get a person and have it delivered before the shut of business that day. I really don’t know if it is more of these source-chain difficulties our society and economy are battling with put up-pandemic, but I was unquestionably floored – in point I double-checked and triple-checked and quadruple-checked – when I understood our new fridge would not be shipped for just about two weeks.
Two months to wait around for a new garage fridge?! (An additional totally fat, hanging-curveball-proper-over-the-center-of-the-plate to start with-planet issue.)
We bought ice. Huge baggage, not the little 5-pounders. We dragged our two significant coolers out of one particular of the closets in the garage and loaded the two up with everything that had been in that fridge. A few times afterwards, we acquired additional ice. A couple times afterwards, nonetheless extra ice, simply because, you know, these are Coleman coolers we’re conversing about, in which ice basically melts right after a working day or two. My wife says I have to wait around until Xmas or one thing to get a Yeti cooler that retains ice frozen for, like, two yrs. (This is an even a lot more obnoxious “problem,” like a 50 percent-environment challenge.)
But, ultimately, salvation. Two wonderful delivery fellas introduced us our new, very essential but functional garage fridge and it was plugged in and cooling issues down in no time. We could finally exhale. No extra dwelling out of coolers!
Then, before long soon after they drove off in their shipping and delivery truck, I observed it, about midway down the entrance of the fridge…a dent and scratch a very little a lot more than an inch extended.
Everyone, on the depend of three: First-globe trouble…
