If you urgently needed a part for haymaking or harvesting or even my pretty ride-on mower around Yuletide, you could wait a month, during which your hay may over-cure, crops rot or, in my case, the grass grow so high in a newly-planted vineyard that rabbits move in and destroy the entire 700 Pinot vines.
A phone call to Europe fixed it, but not before I had some significant words with the mower’s local supplier, then their distributor and finally the Sydney warehouse where, on December 24, the bloke confessed he could see the idle pulley from where he stood, but not even for a case of sarsaparilla, could he parcel it up and wander down to catch the post.
So, I contacted the European headquarters.
This had served me well once before when I won a $600 liquor-branded snowboard in a pub raffle, only for one of the pub’s waitresses (I’m not making this up) to steal it and dispatch it to her son interstate.
The pub did nothing. The Sydney headquarters of the sponsoring liquor brand did nothing.
So, I contacted Wolfenbüttel in Saxony, and within 48 hours, there was a brand-new snowboard at my front door.
I then felt obliged to actually go learn snowboarding that winter (hospitalised only the once).
A nice touch was the German HQ obviously giving Sydney HQ a bit of a verbal blitzkrieg, whereupon in the fog of war a second snowboard arrived. My ethical standards had me return the thing and in no way had anything to do with fearing that Wolfenbüttel might find out I had double-dipped.
I was then barred from that pub — an honour I popped into my CV, under charities.
Back to my ride-on: the local franchise in the previous years had twice attended to it for a repair, quoted me for twenty million bucks and when I politely declined, refused to reassemble it.
A neighbour then reverse engineered the parts and fixed it for a case of sarsaparilla.
But the love-hate relationship with this franchise shop bloomed into glorious hate-hate as I dared to demand basic customer service, complete with a shouting match once.
So, I phoned Europe. Stockholm this time.
Next afternoon, the Australian CEO cut to the chase over the phone: “I’d appreciate the world CEO of my employer to not phone me at 2am in a seething Swedish rage.”
“I’d appreciate saving my vineyard.”
I got my point across when I found a hole in the frothing CEO’s timeline, complete with its jolly statutory holidays and staff barbecues, when the pulley could indeed have been sent.
Alas, it was too late; but the wooden posts of the now extinct vineyard were perfectly spaced for small paddocks, so we wired it all up and filled it with horses.
The Chinese word ‘wei ji’ brings together two words, each meaning ‘crisis’ and ‘opportunity’; clearly the Chinese have a good bead on positivity, if not on farrier costs.
My point: the Federal Government is now teasing farmers that monopolies on exclusive repairs of machinery may be overruled, giving farmers the ‘right-to-repair’ through other means and agents rather than wait for the machinery’s exclusive expert.
I will applaud if it comes, as much as I applauded old Ronny, my hay-trusser, when his brand-new tractor broke down halfway through baling my crop of thistle and rye.
In the smoke of a bushfire too.
My pesky 600 bales did not compare to this man’s livelihood, especially when he was told he would not get help for two weeks, if his lungs held out.
But salt-of-the-earth and ageless Ronny was also adept, where nothing troubled him that a rubber band, WD40, chewing gum and spit-and-grit couldn’t fix.
All while inhaling eucalyptus smoke.
As he clambered up into the cabin, the engine again roaring, I came running from my one hour among the windrows in the fetal position.
“What was your magic this time, Ron?” I coughed.
“Ice-cream stick and two Band-Aids,” and off he went, disappearing into the blue haze.
