Quality Ironing Boards 12.June.2004
Just take a moment to picture a full size ironing board in your head. wait? I’m not joking around, think of one. A full size one, not one of those little table top ones. Great. Now we are thinking of the exact same product. Its made of that cheap metal. Covered with a thin piece of fabric, that doesn’t quite fit it right. The fabric is curling up on the sides to expose the even thinner piece of foam. All of that is on top of a piece of metal in that ironing board shape, stumpy on one end and kind-of pointy on the other. The two legs form that traditional X. Something somewhere is bent in the leg. You’re not exactly sure what’s wrong with it but you are constantly in fear of your life, or at least third degree burns, while using it. You try to iron and it rocks back and forth, hoping that the day it does fall over it just falls away from you. Trying to iron pants, they keep falling off the end. When you finally conquer the wrinkles and its time to put the board up, you have to search around for that little leaver that once you push the “X” is supposed to turn in to an “I” for easy storage, but while closing the board it will get suck, on nothing, at least twice. If you ever get the thing closed, there is just one challenge left: getting the thing to stand upright in some closet. You
finally figure you can shut the door fast enough before it falls over. At last, the ironing experience is over, and the wrinkles are decreased in your article of clothing by at-least 60%!
When I mention the mysterious uneven rocking, everyone knows what I’m talking about. When I say that the sides of the fabric are kind-of curling up, that’s because they are on your ironing board. I have seen filing cabinets made out of that same flimsy metal, but I have also seen some made out of cherry wood. That’s the problem about ironing boards, they’re all crap. There are no nice ironing boards, if there are, no one own one. “High Quality” and “Iron Board” just don’t go together. Most things you have an option to get the cheap one or a quality one, but that’s not the case with ironing boards. Ironing boards have to be crap, it’s some kind of universal constant. The old phrase “if you build a better mouse trap”, well you know what? There are better mouse traps on the market right now. I’m officially changing it to “if you build a better ironing board” you would be some sort of national hero. If someone ever finds a quality ironing board please let me know, I am sick of being afraid that I’ll show up in the headline of the paper, “Man Dies in Freak Ironing Accent”.
(Ok, I can’t guarantee journalistic integrity of this post. The most research I’ve done was ask a couple people “have you ever seen an ironing board that wasn’t a piece of crap?” The best answer I get was, “some older ironing boards aren’t that bad, cause they’re made of a little thicker metal”. I intentionally didn’t do a Google search on it. I can’t have a perfectly good blog topic ruined thanks to a little investigative reporting.)