Forty years ago, my true love bought me a pair of binoculars for my birthday. I’d just seen my “spark bird”—the first bird that is so marvelous that it sets a person, theoretically, on the path to becoming a birder. My brother had shown me a western tanager in his binoculars and I could not have been more excited. I had no idea they even made such a thing.

The tanager, not the binoculars.

Anyway, Dave shopped carefully and found these binoculars, making sure they could be adjusted for my own eyeballs, which are stupidly close together. (My entire head is small. I could wear a standard contraceptive diaphragm as a hat.) And they were spectacular. You could train these babies on a bird in a dense hedge with almost no photons hitting it, and it would look floodlit. He paid more for them than he ever shelled out for an automobile.

They were Swarovskis. A very respected brand. They did not, however, make me a birder. I might have been in the birder shell, but I had not begun to pip, or emerge, and it would be almost another thirty years before I would fledge fully into the birder camp. By that time I had abused my Swarovskis the same way I abuse all tools: I never cleaned them, I hammered in garden stakes with them, I used them as pie weights, that sort of thing.

The diopter knob had fallen off and I didn’t do anything about it because I don’t even know what a diopter is or whether it’s important. The focus knob was creaky. When you see movement in a tree, you want to swing those binos up and focus them in one motion, not stop to get a pipe wrench for your focus knob.

So the last time I was at a birding festival, I took them to the optics expert. Can these be fixed? I handed them over.

Whoa. Not only could they be fixed, but they were Swarovskis, and that fine company, he said, will repair them for free, no receipt, no problem. I contacted them. Sure enough. They sent instructions.

Well, you have to figure Swarovski Optik is a foreign company because of the aggressiveness of all those consonants. And it is. Austrian, established in 1895 as a crystal-cutting operation. The Optiks department came along in 1949, after the company was able to expand thanks to its affiliation with the…well, I’m getting ahead of myself.

The instructions were in perfectly good English, but so formal and detailed and precise that they really got my attention. These days companies are super chatty. Make you slog through videos that don’t get to the point until they’re done showing you how cute and friendly they are.

Not these people. They got right to it. Create account. Log in. Register product. A case number will be assigned to your product. Remove all accessories from your product. Wrap in bubble wrap. Please note our repair times can take 6-8 weeks. We are extremely thorough. Timeline of events: This, this, this, that, and the other thing, including items like #3. Product is tagged and put on shelf in the order of which it was received. It went on and on for two pages. Product is dusted off by tiny robot wearing pinafore. Hansel und Gretel is read to Product at bedtime. Light snacks provided to Product. I looked for an option to view my product by live videocam as it sat on the shelf, like when you board your cat, but none was to be found.

Something about the thoroughness of the instructions led me to believe I should not, under any circumstances, inquire about the progress of my repair, which will only slow things down, because otherwise it will proceed like clockwork. Sure enough, after precisely six weeks, I get the following email:

We are pleased to inform you that we will return your device to you.

Was not returning it ever a possibility? There was an invoice listing five thousand things they’d checked on and cleaned or replaced. My total due: $0. Damn!

This is some company, I thought. I did some research.

Turns out the Swarovski company has been in the same family for 130 years and, notably, family members were fervent and lavish supporters of the Nazis; the 500 Sieg-Heiling marchers in one torchlight parade were all discovered to be Swarovski plant employees. Alfred Swarovski himself sent Hitler birthday greetings and money for a holiday home in Tyrol. Et cetera.

In 2018 the company commissioned a study of its history but then declined to publish its findings, stating “Swarovski is a company that generally tries to keep the owners’ personal stories largely out of the public eye because it does nothing for the business.”

Oh.

Might give the business a bit of a boost in 2025, though, huh?

Damn fine binoculars, I will say.