Getting Framed, Good And Proper

Remember when Billy Crystal used to portray Ricardo Montalban on Saturday Night Live? His trademark phrase was that he would rather look good than feel good and Crystal delivered it perfectly every time. It became a popular quote of the day.

While not wanting to get on my soapbox I must say that something made in China is often made to LOOK good but not BE good. Living in Asia (where I call home) there is a flood of these inexpensive goods on the market and buying American means spending quite a bit more because of tariffs and import duties. It's been my experience that most people here prefer to buy 'cheap'.

I got a couple new photos of my folks recently, which necessitated a trip to the store that sells photograph frames at the mall. Their selection of styles and sizes is enormous and their prices low. Their choice of levels of quality however was not so great and, while most of the frames tended to 'look' good, there was no indication of 'quality manufacturing' to be found. But I needed two frames and bought a couple of gilded numbers at a very reasonable cost.

When we got home and tried to install the photos the first thing that happened is that some of the plastic clips broke. This caused the backing to become loose and the picture to slide down and become un-centered. The solution was a couple strips of duct tape to hold the back in place.

The next idea was to employ the use of two 'gold' colored rubber bands to hold the frames together and this definitely worked but looked terrible. I certainly didn't want to dishonor my forebears with this cheesy kind of set-up. It was back to square one... new frames.

If you type 'photo frames' or 'certificate frames' into your search box you get about a half million hits. There are lots of frames available online and in every style, color and material imaginable. You don't have to go too far down the list to see the difference between quality and crapola. I'll gladly pay a little more for something that looks good AND feels good!

You can find anything you want on these various websites. If you can't find just the right material, style, size and color you desire you can also order custom-made frames at reasonable prices. I like the Internet. It makes buying things so convenient. Maybe I learned my lesson this time and can save some headaches in the future. We'll see!