Time for a rant.

I bought a pair of wellingtons in May, the expensive sort with good ankle support so I could use the wellies instead of hiking boots on my excursions (which often take me to bogs and other wet places). Very early on I noticed that there’s a hole in the tip of the right boot, I have no idea if it was there already when I bought them because if it’s something I did, then I’ve managed to kick something really hard because a splinter had burrowed itself all the way through the thick rubber of the toe part. I applied some superglue to it to seal the hole.

This one hole I could live with, it was easy enough to patch. But today as I was walking on a bog, I noticed that my ankles were getting wet. I had a closer look and found that all the four seams around the ankle were more or less broken! It’s the part of the boot which gets bent the most when you walk and especially when you bend down (which I have to do, being a flower photographer).

Total crap. Photographer or not, I haven’t subjected these boots to anything they shouldn’t be designed for. Bending your ankles is a fairly normal activity, I would say!

For now on, I will buy cheap rubber boots. If one summer is all they’re going to last, they will still match this expensive pair that failed on me after two months of use. The price tag is obviously no guarantee for quality anyway! Which is true for a lot of things these days, unfortunately. Manufacturers cut corners any way they can, relying on the stupidity of the consumers. And I’m one of them, duh on me.

Oh well. Let’s see if duct tape can seal the holes enough so I could at least use the wellies the rest of the season. Cheap boots next year.

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Edit 2009-08-30: I took the broken boots to Ljusdals Motor and they replaced them, no questions asked – absolutely no issue about the missing receipt either! Excellent service, let’s just hope that the new boots hold a bit better.