The P.O.S. 4000 snowblower

I'm guessing that you probably have at least one thing in your home that is a P.O.S. model. Most people do, although they may not be aware of the "P.O.S." designation. It's a French term. Yep, goes back a century or two. "P.O.S." stands for Piece of Shit. (Those French are so clever.) It's such a handy label because you can slap it on anything you like when you're complaining about it, and you don't have to use vulgar language. Even better, if the person to whom you're talking also has a P.O.S. something or other, s/he will smile and know exactly what you mean.

We are fortunate enough to be able to boast being the owners of not one, not two, but several P.O.S. models. The focus of this post is our early 19th century snowblower, seen here.

I'd like to tell you that Joe is just making his way through a foot- high bank of snow, stirring up a nice white cloud of powder, but that gives way too much credit to the P.O.S. 400. Those are really just exhaust fumes.




We bought the P.O.S. 4000 from a neighbor after our first winter here. We'd had enough with shoveling the driveway and the sidewalks. Seemed like a good idea at the time. We were thrilled to be so "high tech" and to not have to expend the effort on all that shoveling.

But the "high tech" snowblower turned out to be a joke, and the joke was on us. One thing we've learned since becoming home owners is that we need a good sense of humor. Our home, as much as we love its charm, often feels like a money pit, and that goes for many of the appliances and tools within our home. There's always something that needs to be fixed and that means shelling out more money.



Here's Joe still trying to start the snowblower after 45 minutes.





And, here he is again clearing our sidewalk, while my car sits in the neighbor's driveway across the street. Note, the the neighbor's snow removal guy has to work around my car! Something's wrong with this picture. Ironically, his snowblower is also 100 times better than ours.



So for kicks, Joe thought it would be fun to create an "ad" of sorts extolling all the virtues of our got-to-have-it p.o.s. snowblower. Take a look for yourself. It's got some amazing features, and it's guaranteed to make you laugh.

(Note, you may need to double click on the image to blow it up so that you can read the fine print.)