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MOP_HEAD
February 18, 2017
One of my recent adventures in American
consumerism involved a need to mop up During periods of heavy
the basement floor. rain, of which we've had
many of late, we get ground
A basic technique for picking water seeping into the
up water off of a floor is a lowest point in the house.
mop with some sort of squee-gee
attachment: with a good mop (Or we did before
and a bit of physical effort I put in a sump pump
you can move a lot of water three feet below
pretty quickly. There's almost ground level, to
no other way to go after a WATER_REISING route the water
shallow layer of water. around our house.)
For many years, we had a Casabella
mop that worked fairly well: these
feature a lever built into the handle
that retracts the mop head, pulling
it through a constriction that
squeezes water out of it.
It was getting difficult to buy
replacement mop heads for this
model-- internet orders were the I'm not a huge fan of internet orders--
only way-- and the mop handle and I don't really understand why anyone
itself was getting old and rusty, is. Busted websites run by dubious
so I started thinking about corporations and/or obvious scammers:
just buying a replacement. this does not count as "fun" with me.
If you're anything like me, with at And I really wanted the mop
least a passing interest in being an now without waiting several
ethical consumer, a simple task like days for delivery.
this can be a major undertaking.
I don't like to support the massive chain stores,
but there are often few alternate options these
days. And if I did resort to a chain store, I'd
rather stay away from the Big Boxes of Emeryville.
Emeryville has never seen a dollar it didn't like,
and can't conceive of why anyone would go on about
"preserving character"... but it's a cop-out option
right across the border from where I live: the pit Actually, I could be
of E-ville vacuums up business from the lazy and/or exaggerating that
over-scheduled, but Oakland doesn't even get any problem: more recenly
tax dollars out of the deal. I've heard that some of
those places were built
My plan plan of attack: comb through on top of the Oakland-
Oakland's Chinatown, looking for small Emeryville border with
places with housewares, then try the ChanCo a deal that splits tax
restaurant supply outlet, and then if that revenue between the
failed, I'd resort to the "Bed Bath and towns.
Beyond" down in Oakland's Jack London
Square area.
Just to make a long story even more tedious: my
first few stops in Chinatown turned up little that
was mop-like-- though I did get a replacement for SHARP_BUT_DULL
my favorite kitchen knife, the same model I've
been using for ten years of so...
And so, I swung by the restaurant supply store,
a place I'd previously noted as a supply of
microwave safe dinner bowls of various sorts...
As I expected and hoped, they did have
some basic raggedy-andy-hair mops.
I like these, but you also need
some way to squeeze water out of
the mop-- The industrial-style
wringers are awfully bulky, but I
might've gone for one of those
*if* they had them: they had the
massive buckets with wheels, but
no wringer attachments. So, it was off
to the dreaded
"Bed Bath and Beyond."
GETTING_A_HANDLE
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