I've seen this sort of screw up a few times, but none as extreme as that. Usually it's things like transit screws/pegs either missing (so the unit is destroyed in transit) or alternatively glued in place.

Ah -- transit screws :-)

Just ask my ex-wife how much it cost to replace the kitchen worktop when she used the new washine machine with reading the instructions.

:-)

Just ask my ex-wife how much it cost to replace the kitchen worktop when she used the new washine machine with reading the instructions.

I'm assuming that you meant without reading... Really hoping you meant without reading... but if not that would explain the ex prefix!

Just ask my ex-wife ...

Just where she put the bloody transit screws, just so you also know.

When the time comes to move the washing machine to your next abode, you will need them.

Or you will probably be needing a new washing machine.

As Murphy (and the manufacturer) would have it, most times they are not plain* screws.

They are usually hard to source, expensive OEM screws.

*The type you can make a run to any hardware store and purchase in a pinch.

So consider yourself warned.

O.

> When the time comes to move the washing machine to your next abode, you will need them.

Interesting difference between the UK - where I was raised - and the US, where I now live...

In the former, you typically take all appliances with you when you move house. In fact, I distinctly remember that when I bought my first house, the parsimonious sellers had taken not only the washing machine and fridge, but even the bathroom toothbrush shelf and loo-roll holder. Oh, and every ceiling light fitting. (Hey, at least they'd left me the bulbs. A friend bought a house and the sellers had even taken the bulbs and bayonet holders, then so that there weren't "dangerous loose wires", had thoughtfully twisted the two wires together in every room and taped them. You can imagine how that went when he took possession on a dark winter afternoon and tried to turn a light on...)

In the US, at least in my experience, you leave everything like that. Unless you specifically exclude them from the sale, the expectation is that the washer, dryer, fridge, oven etc will all stay with the house. In my case I also acquired two trailers, a ride-on lawnmower and a cat, but that's another story...

House sale contracts tend to be wise to that sort of idiocy and have an agreed inventory to make its clear what’s included and what’s not.

Last time we moved we were downsizing and left all the white goods, plus quite a bit of furniture. The buyers were FTB so they were over the moon :-)

@David 123

"Interesting difference between..."

Here in South Africa fixtures (i.e. anything bolted or screwed onto or into the structure of the house) has to remain, unless stipulated in the sales contract that it will be removed. You also have to leave a stove behind - usually the one that was there, but not necessarily.

Removing lamp shades or fixed lights therefore is not allowed - if there were such items there have to be similar or the same after the house has been vacated. Removing bulbs is just mean.

As regards light fittings, if you've chosen them to your own taste as part of the decor it mages sense to take them. We brought four wall lights here from our last house. I can't remember what we put in their place - probably the sintered spelter pseudo-baroque monstrosities that were in the house when we bought it.

I once had a colleague bring me his new PC to fix. He'd carefully built it himself - new minitower case, motherboard, everything - but it just didn't work.

I figured it out in the time it took me to put the PC on my desk and rotate it so I could see the back.

Long story short, he'd screwed the motherboard directly to the backplate of the chassis, scorning those little brass standoff pegs and thus shorting the motherboard to the chassis in a thousand places. The fact that the ATX I/O shield couldn't be fitted because it didn't now line up with the aperture on the chassis, he considered merely as an indicator of how shoddily the chassis must have been made.

So I re-assembled it with an appropriate quantity of standoff pegs and perfectly-fitting I/O shield, and amazingly it worked . That motherboard must have been pretty idiot-proof.

The icing on the cake was that the colleague in question worked for our IT department, and therefore should have had more technical knowledge than, say, a marketing droid...

Will tell this story against my young-teenage self (with no mentor, and no "how to" resources easily available).

Trying to build my first two-transistor electronic circuit on Veroboard (lines of copper parallel to one edge of board, with 0.1"-spaced holes drilled in as a grid, diameter narrow enough to ensure continuity), I did not realise that I had to cut the tracks between where I had used them for different nodes in the circuit.

Way way back, we had Acorn Atom kits returned where the hobbyist has used epoxy glue instead of solder to fit all the chips. Not so many, about 30 maybe. How we laughed.... he didn't get a refund.