New kit

What real man ever needs to consult a map?  What real man gives a flying toss about what he wears?  What real man cares a hoot about what people think of his choice of friends, lifestyle or partner?  What real man EVER reads instructions?

Marcia's new shop will open on Monday.  She has spent um, a very huge big lot stocking it (I shed a tear or two when I glimpsed my bank statement last night).  The shop looks great with all its rustic handmade shelving, wooden walls and modern freezers and coolers.

We are still importing loads of kit, not just for the shop, but also for my restaurant on which all effort will be focussed over the next few weeks.  In amongst it all was a small vacuum sealing machine.

Naturally, as a 'Real Man' I just had to have a play.

The machine came from South Africa so the first thing I had to do was figure out how to plug it in, South African plugs being incompatible with European sockets.  Being a 'Real Man', I solved it by chopping off the plug and sticking the bare wires into a socket.

Fresh out of the box.  Remains of my chicken salad lunch top right.
Did I think of vacuum packing that? Of course I didn't!

There are three buttons on the top marked, 'Seal Only', 'Cancel' and 'Vacuum Seal'.  Only panicky woosies need 'cancel'.  Also in the box were two rolls of ribbed plastic tubing, a sort of 100 metre 20 cm wide plastic bag open at either end.

'Aah!' I thought, 'you make your own bags!'  (Who said Real Men are stupid?)

Looks like a waffle maker for anorexics...

I dug out the scissors from my hairdressing kit (er, deep, throaty manly cough, I mean Barber's kit) and chopped off a length of roll, stuck it into the machine, clamped the lid down and pressed 'Seal Only'.  The light came on and seconds later winked off again.  I expected it to make a noise or something.  I expected the stench of melting plastic.  Nothing.  So I pressed 'cancel'.  Still nothing.  I popped open the lid and removed the bag.  It had a perfect seal along the bottom.  I blew the bag up like a balloon. not a hint of a leak.  I kept blowing in there trying to burst it but I might as well have been trying to blow up a hot water bottle.

Now I had worked out how to make a bag, I needed something to vacuum seal.

If you are not a real man, you would pick something the machine was designed for, something inane, like a pork chop from the fridge.  A pork chop wouldn't do at all, not for me anyway, I needed something else.  It was Marcia who had asked me to work the machine out so what better item to vacuum pack than her mobile phone?  I was giggling like a school girl (but a 'real manly' schoolgirl) as I located her phone, made up a bag and then vacuum packed it.

This machine is just so cool!  Have you EVER tried to rip one of these bags open in a hurry?

Tightly sealed in plastic, the ring tone was a bit muffled but Marcia's hearing is acute so when I rang her mobile, she came rushing into the room. 

Man, you should have seen her face!  It's the very best laugh I have had in years.

She could see in my eyes that if left alone with the machine I would vacuum pack everything in sight, including the dog if I could stop him wriggling so she confiscated it before I used up all her rolls.  Spoilsport.

Joking aside, it is a seriously useful and inexpensive bit of kit.