I actually did some work on Labor Day. My job was to
replace the burner elements of my gas grill. My grill is probably 6 or 7 years
old, and I’m one of those guys who is grilling something all year long. I’ve
worn the thing out.
So, there I was wearing yellow dish washing gloves,
no shirt and plaid shorts, with sweat pouring off the end of my nose, peering
under the hood of my Commercial Series 2000. There was a half of an inch of
black sludge lining the walls. In the catch pan underneath was a two inch glob
of meat drippings that had to be scraped off with a hard metal spatula. The
actual cooking grate had its own greasy lining, mostly on the underside, the
residue of a thousand chicken breasts, jumbo shrimp, New York strips, hamburgers,
hotdogs, pork chops and the occasional pork tenderloin. I had bought some sort
of environmentally agreeable citrus-based natural cleaner to spray on all of
this mess and was skeptical of its value. There’s a reason that old fashioned
oven cleaners were “environmentally disagreeable.” Because they could strip the
chrome off of a trailer hitch in two seconds! You either wore gloves when you
used that stuff or you lost fingers.
I was pleasantly surprised. I sprayed the stuff all
over everything and waited two minutes like the directions suggested. The smell
was an unholy mixture of rotten oranges and ammonia. But after two minutes and
a little elbow grease, the black sludge started melting away like the wicked
witch in the Wizard of Oz.
After all of this cleaning it was time to install
the “universal elements” which were advertised as “easy to install.” Like most
advertising, this claim proved to be bogus. Actually they would have been easy
to install if my hands were the size of a five year old child’s. There was a
crucially important step in the process that required you to line up the tiny
holes on the two telescoping tubes. These tiny holes must be aligned because if
not there would be no holes through which the gas flames could travel, turning your
gas grill into a giant metal eunuch. To accomplish this vitally important step
in the installation, I was provided with a single screw so ridiculously small,
so agonizingly tiny that to merely pick it up required the fine motor skills of
a concert pianist. I’m not kidding. Here are some pictures as proof:
Needless to say, this procedure took half of the
morning. Luckily, I have some of those tiny screwdrivers, the ones you use to
repair eye-glasses. I felt like I was diffusing a bomb. There I was, hands
shaking, reading glasses trying not to slip off the end of my sweating nose,
struggling mightily to thread a quarter of an inch screw into a sixteenth of an
inch hole without completely losing my religion. The first one took twenty
minutes. Each of the next two took only slightly less time.
Finally it was all done and working like a charm. Time
to take it for a test drive.
I grilled up some brats, tomatoes and fried bread and
it was a magnificent triumph.