I bought a new grill over the weekend which was a real pain in the ass. I’m the kind of guy that researches every grill made before buying one. Anyway, the market is now full of stainless steel grills because people have finally gotten tired of replacing these things every year and by now all the manufacturers have realized they can get more money for stainless.

Unfortunately, the quality of stainless steel varies greatly. When you buy silverware, actually cheap flatware, you can see on the box the ratio of nickel to stainless, usually 18/10 or 18/8. The stuff with more nickel has a higher luster. Well, you can’t do that on a grill yet but I’m here to tell you, you get what you pay for and most of these stainless grills are of poor quality stainless and will look like shit directly. Also, the burners, the important part, are sometimes made out of crap while the rest of the grill is stainless.

Regardless, I picked one but the half-wit at Home Depot decides he doesn’t want to look for one in the box, he wants to sell me the floor model. I know the floor model won’t fit into my car because I was bright enough to measure before coming into the store and I was standing there with my own tape measure when he tried to pawn it off.

“This won’t fit in my car.”

“What kind of car do you have?”

“Just get me one in a box.”

“We can deliver it.”

“Get me one in a box.”

Forty-five minutes later I leave with the grill. I carefully unpacked each piece. I opened up the bag with all the screws, counted them, and placed each individual size into it’s own little Tupperware things which I keep for these occasions. I laid out all the tools I could possibly need and more, just in case. I am an expert assembler.

I then checked all the parts according to the instructions and put them into a rough order as I would need them. The final step was to sit down on the couch and read the instructions cover to cover, insuring I knew how the process would pan out as I progressed. I noted that there were some problems with the illustrations, namely, that they seemed to be rough crayon type sketches similar to what a child draws when they have no sense of perspective. There was no detail at all, just rough blocks of out of focus shapes.

Well, I could work around that. However, the instructions themselves seemed to have a lot of words I’d never come across before and I have a large vocabulary. In three languages. I figured I could work around that too, being mechanically inclined. In addition, there was no mention anywhere in the instructions of the many washers and lock-washers enclosed. Not enough for every bolt but plenty of them and I would have to guess on those, as well as a large piece of grill, about 24” x 6” that was also mentioned nowhere in the instructions.

After struggling for thirty minutes trying to attach the heavy-ass weighted base to some legs with no help, on the next step I realized I had them on backwards and had to start again. They were backwards because the instructions were backwards. Literally. That started a long afternoon of swearing and sweating. The high point was trying to decifer sentences that went like this:

“Place F end C into equipment section vsentraew.”

Nice, huh? By the time I got the damned thing together I was fit to be tied and I’m good at that crap. I was a broken man by days end.