Sunday, September 30, 2007

Reruns and Superglue

I'll warn you right up front--this is a re-run. Or "rerun", I guess, since Oxford apparently eliminated hyphens within words this month. It's five years old, though, so I doubt that many (any?) readers of this blog have seen it before.

I'm sure we'll all be glad when I'm done sorting through these old files...


Why doesn’t anyone ever superglue his fingers together anymore?

In the seventies, supergluing your fingers together was a story more common than the poodle in the microwave or the terrorist telling the gas station clerk to avoid a certain location on a certain date—but it wasn’t an urban legend. Oh, sure, some superglue legends have sprung up in recent years: the hapless victim unwittingly glued to the toilet seat, the creative revenge against a cheating spouse…but it was different in the seventies. Nearly everyone actually knew someone to whom this had actually happened. In fact, nearly everyone WAS someone to whom this had actually happened.

Superglue, of course, was modern technology in those days. We’d never seen anything like it. In an amazing television commercial, a construction worker dangled from a beam, supported entirely by a hardhat secured to the beam with superglue. We couldn’t believe it.

We couldn’t use it, either.

Personally, I glued my seventy-seven year old grandmother’s fingers together in an effort to glue plastic garbage bags (perhaps the one material on earth to which superglue does not adhere) together to create a home-made Slip-n-Slide. We were able, with a little nail polish remover, to separate her fingers before my mother came home, but a telltale crustiness remained ever after she’d bathed. She agreed not to tell my mother, but I was petrified. Everyone knew that superglue stayed FOREVER. I looked doubtfully at her fingers and contemplated the weighty possibility that I’d ruined my grandmother.

My husband laughed at me when I told him this story. It was easy for him to laugh. He’d never superglued an elderly relative to anything. The nearest he’d come was supergluing himself to a garden hose while trying to repair a cut he didn’t want his parents to find that he’d made.

The stories are endless. I’ll spare you the one from my college days where I tried to repair a broken fingernail with superglue while drinking and ended up getting glue on the rim of my beer can.

“Why,” I asked my husband, “don’t people ever superglue themselves to thing anymore?”

“We’ve learned,” he suggested, and then my six-year-old daughter interjected, “and the ones who are too young to learn hear their parents telling these embarrassing stories…”

It was a good theory, but I didn’t buy it. Everyone knew, back in the day, how dangerous superglue was. The warnings on the package were nothing compared to the ones whispered by people who’d glued themselves to their model airplanes and telephones, or set forth sternly by parents who didn’t think that even teenagers should be using superglue without supervision. It was serious stuff. We knew it. We revered it and feared it, and then we put our fingers into it and stuck.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does this mean that we've progressed as a whole? You're right; you never hear of superglue emergencies any longer. I do have a friend who recently used superglue, got it on his finger, then scratched his eyelid. It wasn't pretty.

Anonymous said...

To be honest, I think a big part of it is changes in packaging and formulation. I remember when SuperGlue was new and when you punctured end of small ampule/tube it oozed out like water.

The newer gel form and better packaging have helped avert these problems.

I still get a big kick out of how people younger than us thirty-somethings are insulated from harms that were our daily fare.

Do you remember when recess means playing on monkey bars directly over concrete instead of wood chips or thick foam padding? Or when playing lawn darts barefooted could set you on the path of recreational stigmata?

The comic Elvira Kurt does a great routine on this stuff. She mentions a massive recall of cribs made before 1988 in Canada because the rails were wide enough that babies could get their heads through and then stuck. She makes the connection that those were OUR cribs.

Anonymous said...

I once accidently superglued my lips together. Very unpleasent.

Alan (Evil) Miller said...

I think I can answer your question:

Americans don't fix things anymore. We just throw them away and buy another. I've glued my fingers together recently fixing something with Super Glue but I just quickly pulled my fingers apart before it set up completely.

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Anonymous said...

You have to express more your opinion to attract more readers, because just a video or plain text without any personal approach is not that valuable. But it is just form my point of view

Anonymous said...

You have to express more your opinion to attract more readers, because just a video or plain text without any personal approach is not that valuable. But it is just form my point of view

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