Lawnmower Blades for Dummies

Uhhh, what lever, Greyson?

For some reason, most children of the so-called "digital age" never had the pleasure of pushing a lawn mower around Mommy and Daddy's yard. There are undocumented immigrants for that kind of work, to the tune of $35 per week... That being said, someone somewhere once asked "How to Adjust Lawnmower Blades"¹ and Greyson Ferguson, a digital kid who had probably never even used a mower, happily answered the question for eHow... or he at least tried to.

We tracked down Greyson's sole resource, a reworded wikipedia article (still available at archive.org), and learned why his answer is so... weak. Ferguson opened with a crappy introduction that demonstrated his ignorance of lawns and mowing, and went from there:

"When mowing your yard with a lawnmower, you can adjust the settings on your mower to suit the different lengths of grass."

People want to "suit the different lengths of grass"?! Does that mean they change the height of the mower deck continuously? Not with any mower anyone at Antisocial Network HQ has ever used! Greyson apparently thinks the only reason for changing the height of the blade is that you can "wait longer in between cuts..."  Oh, that lucky boy, to have never mowed a hilly acre of grass with a push mower! We won't belabor the reasons for changing blade height, since there are plenty of sources for the people who want their lawns to look like golf courses. We will point out, however, that Ferguson's "instructions," such as they are, are pretty worthless to the vast majority of mower owners:

"Find the blade adjustment lever on the side of the mower. If you are using a driving mower, the lever is typically located alongside your leg. Pulling the lever up removes less grass while moving the lever down creates a closer cut."

Yup: that's all he wrote; but since he had to have at least three steps and 300 words to get paid, Greyson padded this out with instructions for cleaning out grass and some crappy safety mumbles. On the other hand, he totally ignored the part of his resource that said of adjusting blade height,

"On older or less expensive lawnmowers, this is accomplished by manually moving each wheel to a different slot on the chassis."

Besides his clear ignorance of the topic and his failure to address a plurality of the mowers out there, Greyson's instructions are themselves ambiguous: How does one "pull a lever up" if the lever rotates around a pivot point?
No, Ferguson's instructions are useless for many people and incomplete for others. When we see someone getting paid for slipshod work like this, we gather 'round our conference table and write up a presentation for the Dumbass of the Day award. Congratulations, Greyson: it's yours (again!).

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_5894553_adjust-lawnmower-blades.html

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