This is a rant that I’ve been stewing about for a few days…
Some of you may recall that I recently purchased a used electric guitar… well, I got the electric, and it’s lots of fun to play! 2 minor issues: #1) there is a whammy bar assembly, but no bar itself!; #2) there are three pickups, but only one works (either the switch is bad, or something inside is screwed up). Neither of these problems is any biggie, so I wasn’t worried about them, and had no immediate plans to do anything about them…
Then, about 3 weeks ago, I was changing the strings, and managed to break the nut on the guitar (if you want to know what the nut is, go here and click on “headstock” to see a pix of it). Damn! Gotta fix that! The nut is essential (if cheap, being merely a piece of cheap plastic about an inch and a half long… maybe 25 cents)!
I haul the guitar into Chong-No (ccentral Seoul, not too far from the American Embassy) to a big music store place, and inside I find a shop that fixes guitars… Astrogirl was along to translate, but the guy spoke good English, so it wasn’t necessary… so I tell the guy, please put a new nut on it, and (since it’s here anyways) could you see if you could find a whammy bar, and give a look inside to see what’s wrong with the electronics and let me know if you can fix it cheaply (as I wouldn’t spend more than 20 or 30 bucks to fix it). So, straight on this? Big problem: the nut! Minor side issues, since I have the guitar in the shop anyways, electronics and whammy bar…
The guy says OK, it’ll be about 3 days. I said fine. Astrogirl and I left… to make a long story short(er) 2 weeks, and about 50 phone calls later (none of which elicited ANY information about the guitar), finally the guy says the electronics CANNOT be fixed (WTF??? 
CANNOT? If I had a soldering iron, I could buy all new electronics and do it myself! CANNOT be fixed??), and they’re still looking for a whammy bar for the guitar… it’ll be done on Monday.
OK, fine… Monday comes, I ask Astrogirl to call there before I go to make sure. She has the following conversation (in Korean, translated here for your convenience… no charge.):
“Hi, I’m calling about the Vester guitar…”
“Oh, yeah… it’s done.”
“Did they find a whammy bar?”
“Yes, everything is fixed.”
“What about the nu…”
“I said, ‘EVERYTHING IS FIXED’ OK??”
“Yes, but what about the…”
“EVERYTHING IS FUCKING FIXED!”
At this point, Astrogirl hung up on the asshole girl who had been so rude to her, and called me to complain… :rolleyes:
So anyways, I head off to Chong-No (keep in mind, please, that going to Chong-No is a major pain in the ass from here… shuttlebus to the subway station, 30 minutes on the subway, and then a 15 minute walk, and then the same in reverse to get home… minimum 3 hours). I get there, and retrieve the guitar, and come home…
I get home, and sit on the bed, take the guitar out of the gig-bag, and try to strum it… PLUNK! Huh? I take a close look… they put a new nut on it that is** SO FUCKING LOW THAT THE STRINGS ARE LAYING FLAT ON THE FRETBOARD!** All of them!!! Let me repeat: all of the strings are laying flat on the neck. IE: the guitar CANNOT be played at all now!
I have been in Korea for more than 5 years now, and I thought I had seen/experienced incompetance and outright fucking indifference to doing anything approaching a good job, but this takes the fucking cake! It’s as if I took a car into the shop to have them fix a flat tire, and returned to find that they had replaced the flat with the tire from a toy Tonka dump truck!
What the hell did you do, Mr. (supposed)Guitar-fixer-guy? Did you just reach into a bin of spare parts, grab the first cheap plastic nut you found, slather some glue on the motherfucker, and slam it into place without caring whether it was the right size for the job (well, I guess I just answered my own question there… that’s exactly what you did!)? Did you not notice when your replaced the strings that there was NO clearance between the fretboard and the strings? Did you not know that strings must vibrate to make sound, and that vibration requires that the strings are free to move, and that being free to move requires some FUCKING CLEARANCE?
Are you simply as stupid as a box of fucking hammers? Or did you do it on purpose? I suspect the latter… as, experienced as I am with human stupidity in all of it’s forms, I cannot conceive that ANYONE could be that stupid. You did, after all, beat the other 100,000,000 sperm! Even a person who had never seen a guitar before would immediatly know that this one could not be played, and upon cursory inspection would realize why!
AARRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
AARARARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!
Astroboy tears at his hair and bangs his head on the desk