cimorene

We had to go to the home center yesterday to get the protector that goes on the side of the butcher block next to the stove and oven to protect it from heat and moisture. From all my googling I THOUGHT that the home center (and most hardware stores online in Finland) didn't have a screw extractor. I eventually found some at Etra, and also a few of those sketchy-named sites that sell random shit, as well as mentions of them in Finnish on bulletin boards - usually after all the tips about how to get a screw out without one though, so it seemed they weren't widespread.

In the course of googling for them I went through the home center's website and looked at every item in the screwdriver section and every item in the power screwdriver parts & accessories category. Every item! And it wasn't there!

And yet yesterday we walked down the aisle and... it was there. I recognized it by sight. The package didn't have any words on it but a brand name, a German company info and 'made in China'. The product name printed on the shelf wasn't (lit.) 'screw remover' or anything like that as other examples had been. Instead it was more like 'deep somethinged screw tool'.

So this is a problem I've brushed up against before: when an object isn't widespread enough to have acquired a standard term in Finnish, the translator is forced to try to make something up to convey what they think the sense was to the audience. And... then you get stuff like this.

Anyway, Reader, I bought it. We haven't used it yet though.

I highly recommend NOT going to Bauhaus or any place like it in the near future on a Saturday if you are in a part of Finland experiencing a rising spike of pandemic infections, by the way! The last two weeks of news items about it have not appreciably increased the caution of the people in this area. Nobody is wearing masks (they're only recommended for use on public transport and enclosed small spaces, no governmental mention of ventilation) and idiots are continuing to barrel straight at you head-on, turning it into a game of Pac-Man. It was more crowded there than it usually is at the grocery store, but because the aisles are bigger I didn't have any trouble getting away, just a lot of time spent waiting for someone blocking the way to move. The only positive sign I've seen is around 30% of the people out there also engaged in running away from everyone else. Sigh.