Reading the Fine Print

[billroper]

daisy_knotwise has a wonderful old Sunbeam Mixmaster from the late 1970s. Some months ago, she was working on a project -- with the assistance of little girls, who no doubt aided by being a distraction -- when a spatula that she was using to scrape the sides of the mixing bowl collided with the beaters. The spatula was a survivor. The beaters were a dead loss.

The nice thing about a Mixmaster is that you can buy a wide variety of parts for the machines. All we needed to do was to find a matching set of beaters. And all we needed to do that was to find the model number.

Gretchen looked the machine over and came up empty. I did a cursory inspection and agreed. We looked at various beaters on line, but weren't sure that they were the right ones. And thus the mixer sat in the cabinet, waiting for beaters that would fit.

On Christmas Eve, Gretchen is planning to make Christmas cookies with Katie and Julie, because otherwise they are quite likely to explode with anticipation. Any distraction will be a good one. :) And she was lamenting the fact that she would have to use the hand mixer, because the Mixmaster was still sans beaters.

Of course, I have the annoying repository of the Internet that I carry in my pocket. So I pulled it out and typed in "find Mixmaster model number". Up popped a page that informed me that the info was either on a metal plate on the mixer or at the spot where the beaters attach.

I snagged the mixer out from under the cabinet and took it back to my recliner chair next to the 150-watt reading lamp. No metal plate. And there's a big brown plastic plate where the beaters attach, but it just has various bits of info on it, none of which look like a model number. Humph.

Wait a minute. "Hand me your reading glasses."

Gretchen complied. I put them on and looked again. There, above a line of instructions about inserting the beaters, in the tiniest of engraving, was the model number in beautiful brown-on-brown. No wonder we couldn't find it.

Two minutes later, I had ordered the correct beaters from Amazon for Tuesday delivery.

Gretchen still (and understandably!) does not approve of the number of times or length of time that I spend checking the phone full of Internet that is in my pocket.

But yesterday, it was useful.