Furnace Sticker Museum

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So is good artwork. One man's treasure is another man's junk pile, and vice versa. What goes around comes around. All of these thoughts came into my mind today (and went right back out) when I found the Warped site today. It has some very interesting qualities.

The Warped site has visited lawnmower museums, among other sites, that were somewhat eclectic in their subject matter. Today we take a look at furnace stickers. For those of you who may not know what I'm referring to, most home furnaces (and business ones as well) have a sticker on them so that owners will know whom to call when it doesn't work. That is because most furnace manufacturer's rely on local servcie companies to fix them.

The stickers here are all real live, honest to gosh, right off the walls of furnaces, direct to your computer screen. Just looking at these stickers you can get a feeling of what and how service organizations were once run in this country. There are slogans, and services rendered, phone numbers and street addresses. I can bet when you called these companies, you didn't get put on hold and had endless streams of voice mail and menu options to sort through. Come to think of it, when these were new, there were only rotary dial phones, and party lines were common (don't laugh, I used to have one, and it was better than Saturday Night Live).

As you look at these stickers, just keep in mind they were a form of advertising that is not with us much anymore. Now we rely on the walking fingers in the yellow pages, and the Internet to get things done. Maybe we aren't so much better off, after all.

http://www.nwlink.com/%7Epkrogh/museum.html