Battery Powered Kids: Battery Pirates
December 07, 2011, By Andy Hinds 0 comments
About ten years ago, my wife and I went to Guatemala to do a Spanish language immersion program. We stayed with a local family in the picturesque colonial capital of Antigua, took about six hours per day of one-on-one Spanish instruction, and ran around with a bunch of European trekkers in our free time. (Ah, the pre-children years.) Because we were on foot, the most accessible source for picking up incidentals was the Mercado—an outdoor market that sold everything from crafts to livestock.
When the battery on our travel alarm clock died, we put it on our shopping list. Sure enough, the next time we went to the Mercado, there was a guy selling electronic odds and ends from a folding table. We haggled with him (as one must), and felt good about our purchase of one Duracell AA battery for the equivalent of maybe a dime. When we got home and put the battery in the clock, however, the second hand didn't budge.
We'd been had.
We felt like such chumps. I took out the battery and started to look for a manufacture date or some other telltale sign that we should have noticed...
Like, for instance, the fact that the logo didn't say Duracell at all but, rather, Duvacell. And furthermore, upon close inspection, it became clear that the graphics were not printed on the battery casing but hand-painted. You could see the brushstrokes!
It amazed me that someone would go to the trouble to make a forgery of a AA battery. How long did it take to paint it? Was it worth the dime? Was the pirate battery trade more lucrative than, say, folk art?
I'm still intrigued by the idea of someone mixing up paint to just the right shades, holding the off-brand battery in some sort of vice, and going about the delicate work of creating the illusion of quality. Did the artist wear a jeweler's loupe? Did he or she use a stencil for the lettering? A straightedge to separate the black base from the copper top? Or did she freehand it? Was there a whole sweatshop full of battery forgers? A distribution network?
And why, if they were trying to deceive customers, did they not check the spelling of Duracell? Were they just working from a distant memory of the genuine article that one of the gang members had held in his hand as a child? Or was the discrepancy intentional, to create plausible deniability when U.S. Department of Commerce agents parachuted into the Mercado?
To this day, neither my wife nor I can say "Duracell." We say "Duvacell" whenever the occasion arises for battery chat. And every time we say it, I think about an old woman in a brightly colored, hand-woven dress, spending her days making minute brushstrokes on a pile of spent batteries.
Aside from the economic and social implications of the bootleg battery racket, the fact that someone would go to so much trouble to make a counterfeit Duracell is a testament to the brand's reputation. Duracell is international currency. Purveyors of funny money don't counterfeit dong or rupiah or Quetzales; they churn out phony dollars. To the trader of fake batteries, the Duracell AA is a c-note, and let it be known that they didn't pay me to say that.
This Holiday Season, ManoftheHouse.com has teamed up with Duracell to present the Battery Powered Kids initiative. We're challenging dads to forego one premade gift and, instead, build a battery-powered toy or project with and/or for their kids. We will be featuring several projects from contributors and challenging readers to make their own project, take a picture and share it with us on our Facebook page. At the end of December, we will be publishing a slideshow of all our readers' projects to prove that dads can still make things and that projects made by hand are often the most important of all.
