I’m hypothesizing that even households that are reasonably well-equipped may be lacking things (for whatever reasons) that most comparable homes would have. Is there any such void in your home?
I, for example, do not have a toaster. I don’t particularly like toast, and its uncommon that I have guests for breakfast, so I’ve just never gotten one. As I live within five minutes of a number of places that would gladly sell me my choice of toasters 24 hours a day, buying one with little short-term prospect of using it has no appeal to me.
What other pseudo-necessities might these my brethern and sistern be without?
Neither my wife nor I have a cell phone. All of our children do, but they no longer live in the same house as us. We occasionally say to each other, “It might be useful to have one sometimes,” but we’ve never gotten around to buying one.
Until a couple months ago, I didn’t have a pair of scissors. I either tore things open or I used my jackknife. It sucked. But then I bought a two-dollar pair of scissors and now I can open things again.
I also don’t have a real broom. I have a dust mop and a Dirt Devil Broom-Vac. I live in a shoebox, so it doesn’t really prevent me from keeping my apartment spotless.
We don’t have a coffee pot. We were given one for our wedding and had used it approximately twice in seven years when I finally got sick of dusting it or finding places to shove it in the cupboard and sold it to one of the neighbors. It’s been two years, and we haven’t missed it. Some people (my grandmother, the same one who bought us the coffee pot to begin with) seem to think that it is the height of rudeness to have people over for dinner and not offer coffee to them after we eat. Oh, well.
No toaster, no coffee maker, no video games, no tivo, no full-size vacuum.
I also do not have a radio, CD player, or anything else that plays music in my house. I sometimes listen to music in my car but don’t care to when I’m home.
I lack common sense, but I suppose that’s not what you meant.
We don’t have an air mattress for guests, which means that at the rare times that our guest bedroom is overflowing, we have to get extremely creative to find places for the unlucky overflow to sleep.
No toaster here as well. We just moved, and we gave our sad little toaster oven to Goodwill. We went to buy a regular toaster at Target over the weekend, but they were out of the cheap little $6 one they carry, and my wife thought that all of the others (ranging from $15 - $60) were ridiculously overpriced for the purpose of making toast.
As I mentioned in that thread, one can certainly do just fine without a microwave, but some things are made more difficult:[ul][]Defrosting meat quickly. []Microwave popcorn. This limits my popcorn-making abilities significantly. []Heat water quickly and efficiently for tea, etc. []Some frozen dinners don’t give directions for conventional ovens []Reheat leftovers. I eat most leftovers cold. Sometimes, I’ll stick it under the broiler, but this doesn’t usually produce very good results. []2-minute oatmeal. [*]Fun with peeps.[/ul]
I somehow manage to have two toasters and use neither of them.
No landline.
No pets and no (remaining) houseplants.
No “regular” coffee maker (I use a French press).
No TiVo, but I do have a computer I use to DVR stuff, so I guess that doesn’t count.
Car
Driver’s License
Microwave (I do have an electric water heater, because I’m temporarily without a stove - before that I used a kettle on the stove like god intended)
Land line
Video game system
Clothes Dryer (but they’re not all that common around here)
edit: Coffee Maker. I prefer my french press, which takes up about as much space as a cup.