List Christmas presents you received, that never worked when you tried to use them.
- Mouse Trap (the game)
- A 2.5’ knit scarf and small stocking hat received as an adult from a kid. It was a nice gesture.
One year my MIL sent us an antique tea cup and saucer. (She collected antiques and knew I love them.) In a shoebox. With no packing whatsoever.
Of course, they were smashed to smithereens. But I still use the little gold stand they were supposed to be displayed on for pictures. 
Aw. Did you get one that worked? It’s a really fun game.
My daughter’s Christmas when she was in 2nd grade. Not one toy worked. It was horrible. We took them all back and bought a Nintendo.
My younger brother’s Teddy Ruxpin didn’t work at first. My parents got a replacement soon enough. It was a common problem, apparently.
When I was about 10, I had gotten a $20 gift certificate for Radio Shack. The previous year, I’d received a 100-in-1 Electronic Kit from RS, and had a blast with it all year. (I still used it through high school, 8 years later.)
So with my gift certificate, I looked through their catalog and saw a “computer” (this was before Apple Computers were anything outside of Steve Jobs’s garage). On the theoretical side, it was a neat idea: 10 slide levers with numerous wire holes let you construct various logic “circuits” with just wire, light bulbs, and batteries. Unfortunately, the quality was sub-par: all plastic (except for the metallic conduction clips), and what should’ve snapped together were only loosely together, which didn’t hold the metal conductors in place securely enough to create a dependable circuit of whatever you were trying to simulate.
A rock tumbler we couldn’t get to work because it had a bent rod or something. My dad said he’d take it back to Sears and exchange it for a new one. I rudely told him to just return it because I didn’t want a rock tumbler anyway. (Why would ANYONE?)
An automatic cat box (it was on my list, not a ‘what were you thinking?’). Couldn’t even get it assembled, so we took it back to the store and they couldn’t get any of them to work either.
I’m still cleaning the poop box, blech.
We have an automatic litter box and a regular box. The autobox works, and is great, except that at least one cat won’t use it. So we get to have a regular box, too.
Good grief. How frustrating!
I just bought a double barreled tumbler the other day!
Of course, I’m using it for jewelry, not rocks. :D:D
I am still traumatized about a toy I received when I was a kid. It was called Air-Devils sort of a Vertibird type flying set. It was to me the coolest thing imaginable. It worked for 3 minutes then broke never to be used again. I was crushed.
Wow, You-Tube has everything!
God, ain’t the internet but awesome?
Last Christmas, I got my little niece a wall-walking robot. It had little suction cups, and was supposed to walk down, say, your glass patio door. First time out, it fell off the glass immediately, and broke one of its feet off, never to work again.
It seemed as though they must have designed it without figuring in the weight of the batteries.
I bought my mum a log, inoculated with oyster mushroom spore.
2 years later, it’s still sitting in her back garden, with nary a mushroom in sight, as is the shiitake one in my garden I got for myself at the same time.
Bah.
One year I got a monkey’s paw. No matter how hard I thought about what to ask for…
We prefer to think of it as a glass-half-full sort of thing. We have four cats, and having an autobox that two or three of them use DOES cut down on the amount of box cleaning that we have to do. Sometimes I suspect a Feline Conspiracy, though. I wouldn’t put it past the cats to decide that an autobox will make things too easy on the humans, so they take turns going in the regular box, just to keep us on our toes.
How did the scarf and hat not work? Did they make you colder when you put them on or something?
I have wondered for years if my sister and I had the only working Mouse Trap game in existence. It worked fine for us and was a very fun game. I feel sad for everyone whose sets didn’t work.
Sounds like they were too small, probably child-sized.