My silly mother has bought two - a thing that claims to boost a TV signal, but does nothing at all, and a dog-brush that blows air on the dog while it brushes (claims to clean the coat with ‘ions’. Yeah right)
What have you or a friend/relative bought that turned out to be magic beans?
[sub]Do not read this sentence, especially the bit after the comma.[/sub]
yes…
that fruit loopy hairbrush that turns, claiming to straighten your hair and make it shiny… Fucking THING!
A paint roller with a nifty little edging thing - USELESS!
Didi7, which was supposed to lift the TOUGHEST stains. Hogwash. And it smelled funny, too.
Six hundred gajillion organizer-type products, none of which beat the simple “throw it in a drawer, you’ll find it eventually” approach.
Smoothie machine. Bought as a housewarming gift in lieu of a blender. Won’t blend anything tougher then melted ice cream. And the spigot broke in the first month. All I want for Christmas is a food processor. . .
Recently I bought a gel eye mask thinking it would be soothing when I get a migraine. I didn’t read the directions at the store. When I got home, I read that to make it “cold”, you place it in the refrigerator for an hour, not the freezer because that would ruin it. Ugh! You can leave it in the fridge for a week, and when you take it out it’s no more than semi-cool. Also, as soon as it touches your skin for more than a minute, it loses all coolness. Such crap.
A treadmill, a stationary bicycle, and a Nordic Trak. They sat in my house for various lengths of time and I never lost an ounce.
Uhh, Chefguy - those things you mention are interactive. Their presence alone is not enough to make them work.
Yes, I know. I was fairly disgusted when I found that out, too.
What manner of deviltry is this?
Special golf balls. “One pro hit these 400 yards! How far can you hit them???”
They were the same size, but about twice the weight. I couldn’t hit them out of my shadow. And they made my wrists hurt.
Microwave omelette maker. Inedible sulfurus rubbery lump maker, more like. Shudder
“These incredible titanium steak knives! Even cut through steel!” -I stupidly ordered them off TV once. They were made in a Chinese sweatshop, and looked like GI Joe daggers. They rattled about in their handles, couldn’t cut a piece of bread, and were actually “titanium colored”. I eventually got a refund, but lost a fortune on postage.
I love those little “innovations” magazines full of weird “gift ideas” - “A golf club - with a fishing rod inside!” “Never be lost for a light bulb again, with this electronic light bulb tidy - alerts you when you’re running out.” “Combination pooper scooper and toothbrush holder. Personalize with up to three gold initials.”
Just bought a Pentium 4 1.7 gHz socket 423 processor with the mother of all heatsink/fans… and it turns out the clips on the motherboard that hold it all together are broken. I’d say its pretty useless ATM.
Aside from that my wife has this obsession with buying me CD organizers that have all these mechanical properties that make using them like playing with a Rubik’s cube.
Back when I was a teenager, I sent off for one of those vacuum blackhead removers. Not the electric ones they have nowadays, but the ones that look like oversized syringes, sans needles. Blasted thing never worked at all, no matter HOW hard I tried to follow the instructions.
My daughter uses those towel turban headwraps, the sort that promise to make you glamorous while your hair dries. Apparently my head is the wrong shape for those wraps. We’ve both tried wrapping my hair with those things, and they always fall off.
Like LifeOnWry, a gazillion organizer thingies. I keep going back to my tried-and-true “pile it to the ceiling” method.
Anything sold by Igia I’d say is like throwing money down the toilet!
Jerks…
Those plastic closet organizers where you hang like six hangers on one, then drop one side so the clothes are all hanging vertically instead of horizontally. It just made the clothes all bunched together about a foot lower than they were before.
I laughed once because when I was a teenager and digging through the bathroom cupboards I found one of those old breast enlarger devices they used to advertise in the back of ladies mags. (It was something you hold between your palms in front of you and you squeezed it – it had a pretty stiff spring in the middle.) I have NO IDEA why my mom held onto it that long. (Probably still has it, some 40 years later!)
I bought Mexican jumping beans in a clear box. They jumped and I always wondered how they jumped. One day I heard crunching and a giant moth came out of the bean and broke the box and flew around my room.
About ten years ago they sold this hairstyling thing that was more or less a giant, plastic needle. The topsy-tail. I tried it out, and my hair is so thick I got it stuck in there and couldn’t get it out! It took me about fifteen minutes of gentle tugging to wrestle the thing out of my hair. I refered to it as the Hair Weasel from then on.
I gave it to someone with thinner hair.
I bought a little hip-flask key-chain thingie. At the time I though ‘hey, cool!’. Walking back, I realized that:
a) It could only hold half a shot
b) Putting it in my pocket make me look like my groin prosthetic was trying to escape via my trouser leg.
I saw that advertised on TV and made one froma pencil, a bit of string and some cellotape (real Blue Peter style stuff!! - which will make no sense to anyone outside of the BBC viewing area) and it worked! I could only do 1 style with it mind you …
Not something I bought exactly, having fended off three, yes 3! Amw*y reps in my time, I fell for an online scam purporting to pay you for being online … :wally :smack: :mad: :o
I bought a couple of bottles of some miracle cleaning liquid from a guy demonstrating them in a shopping centre.
It was this really weird cognitive dissonance thing; I knew I was being conned, I knew that the fantastical claims they were making were at least overblown, I knew that there was something phony about the demonstrations, but the demo guy was so incredibly charismatic and disarming.
One of the demonstrations was to ask the prospective customer to smear some boot polish on the demo guy’s suit, wherupon he would use some of the fluid from the bottle he was about to sell to clean it off instantly - and he did, and there was no clever switch of products. So I ended up buiying a couple of bottles.
Of course the stuff was completely useless - it had all the powerful cleaning action of ditchwater - I expect the boot polish was screwy or the demo guy’s suit was treated with some kind of expensive stain repellent.
Live and learn.
Back in the seventies every airline inflight magazine had an ad for this rounded steel block (about the size and shape of a small hip flask) that you were supposed to be able to toss into the washer and use in plase of detergent or soap. I think it took more than half a year for them to be called on it. And longer for the ads to dissappear. Seems like wishful thinking can ride you quite a ways.
I think it was also supposed to be ionic.