The Agony and the Ecstacy

No, this is not a book review, though I did read and love the Irving Stone biography of Michelangelo when I was in junior high school. This post is about - lava lights, those compellingly blobby liquid lamps that had their heyday back in the 1960s.   We have been selling them for years and though they've become a bit more streamlined in appearance - sleeker now with a simple modern silver base, their main attraction is still those slowly moving blobs of wax, bulging and morphing their way through the lava liquid. (whatever that is).  Anyway, the last few years we've been having a lot of problems with them.  We keep a couple on display at the store and started to notice that they seemed - kind of inferior.  This led us to start testing them when they came in - and we found a very high percentage of substandard lava lights.  The company and their distributors are always very good about taking back the ones with problems . . . but it takes us a lot of time to test each light, and when 75% aren't working .. . . .  you start to wonder if its worth it.  So, the post title references our situation.  A good working lava lamp is a thing of beauty and something we would always want to sell here - ecstasy.  But a bad one, a fuzzy murky one, one that refuses to blob - agony.  We'll keep trying for awhile longer, but there may come a day when we have to stop selling these beloved but currently frustrating items.  : (