Items you bought that just totally sucked.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I got stuck with a total piece of crap. One so bad that I swear it makes you wonder why these people aren’t prosecuted for fraud.

What stuff have you bought that really, really disappointed you? Either because the quality was so horrendous or it just didn’t do the job as advertised?
Here’s my piece of junk. Looking at the picture what size do you picture in your head? Something about like a dinner plate size? Think again. Barely coffee cup size and weighs a few ounces.

A friend saved a magnet from a old 18 inch speaker. Wrapped it in tape and tied a string on it. I borrowed it several times picking up nails in the yard after construction projects. Work great. Just hold it about 8 inches above the grass and walk slow. I filled a coffee can full of nails after I got my house roofed. This was after the roofers had cleaned up and left! :rolleyes: A whole can full of nails, in the grass, just waiting to wash down into my driveway and car tire.

This piece of crap? Has almost no lifting power at all. Even for nails. Unless you’re holding it a couple inches above the nail and stand still. I just tried finding a tiny philps screw that fell out of my laptop. Useless thing never latched on. I had to sweep and pick the screw out of the dust pile. Got hosed on this one for sure.

35lbs? It wouldn’t even pick up a pair of pliers off the floor!!! 16 bucks burned

2

Once upon a time before I knew any better, I ordered some towels from Fingerhut. Never in my life had I seen brand new towels so threadbare. Never ordered from them ever again. Pure crap!

3

I have a collection of some of the strongest neodymium magnets the world has to offer. I found them all in the course of my work - I repair recycling equipment. Paper shredders somehow get covered in them. Apparently there’s a lot of office paperwork that gets sprinkled with magnets as it is heaved into the shredding bin.

Stack like 4 or 5 of these babies together - each is the size of a tic tac - and I can easily life 35 lbs. Problem is they’re so small. One that was about 5" in diameter would basically be impossible to remove from whatever you picked up with it.

It would probably be worth your time to just make your own magnet broom out of a rectangular box made with very thin wood or non-ferrous metal (aluminum) and attach a handle to it. Then fill it with magnets of any type, the more the stronger the lifting power. The store bought ones aren’t bad - but they’re like 40$.

4

But an item that I bought that totally sucked?

My first wife’s engagement ring - I fell for the whole “Leo Diamond” BS at the jewelry store. It was cracked, and had a black blemish inside it. Plus she left me. So I blame the ring.

I’m also not too fond of any cookware bought anywhere *but *a restaurant supply store. The teflon wears immediately, the handles bend, they’re too thin to evenly disperse the heat, and in general they suck.

5

Cough suppressants. Any of 'em. :mad:

6

Not sure if you’re including prescription meds, but I found that Tussionex worked pretty nicely. The OTC shit with dextromethorphan doesn’t work for me. I’ll add to the list decongestants with phenylephrine (the worthless, meth-proof pseudoephedrine replacement) and guaifenesin/Mucinex. Drugstores are largely a smorgasbord of brightly-colored placebos with dozens of different catchy names.

7

I agree. If you want to suppress a bad cough, I have found that the only thing that works is Codine. You practically have to beg your doctor to get a prescription, I’ve found, though.

8

For everybody’s info ISTR that there was a study that concluded that the only over the counter cough suppresant that worked was Robetusin (sp?). So, whatever is in Robetusin is what works (sorta at least).

9

“100% Egyptian Cotton 800 Thread Count Sheets $10!”

I got what I paid for. The things pilled up within 2 days.

10

Hooker.

(sorry, couldn’t resist)

11

Every item in a multi-gift box shipment from Figi’s. I think they must have taken pictures of the catalog items under a microscope.

12

Cheap tools.

Hardware stores around here seem to sell good tools at high prices, and cheap rubbish at a fraction of the price - sometimes as little as a tenth of the price of the good ones.

The cheap tools, I discovered the hard way, are not merely poor quality. It’s like they’re decorative replicas of the real thing, designed only to take up space in a toolbox. They’re the same size and shape as an actual tool, but if they work at all it’s only because the job is so simple it could be improvised with any implement to hand. Some are so poorly thought out it seems like the designer has only ever seen them in pictures.

13

a cinemen swap vga converter. bought it on the cheap to connect my laptop to a projector… turns out it uses a proprietary cable and only works with a cinemen projector.

14

A Hoover Stick-Vac–I bought it because I was sick of sweeping the damn floor every day in the kitchen and bathrooms. I thought that a stick vac would make it easier and it did, while it worked. Which wasn’t long. IDK what I did wrong, but the damn thing broke within three months and I’ve never bought another one.

15

Cough medicines’ effect mainly placebo - “The review proposes that the major benefit of cough medicines for treatment of cough associated with common cold is related to the placebo effect rather than the pharmacological effect of an active ingredient,” says the author, Ron Eccles, head of the Common Cold Centre at the University of Cardiff.

16

Here is my problem with this constantly referenced study.

There are two classes of subtances widely used as cough supressants.

1.Opiates

2.DXM

Both of these are pharmacologically active, no one would call them placebo.

I suspect the study is playing some sort of trick with semantics, such that even if the frequency of cough isn’t reduced subjectively the irritating feeling is reduced.

17

My mother sent me some of those for a wedding present:eek: I thanked her. Then she came out for a visit and saw them…

But the damn things lasted for-fucking-ever. I think I still have a couple of the washcloths. They quickly became dedicated pet towels so it’s not like they haven’t been used, ill-used, and laundered. And I have been married a long LONG time.

18

Last August was a very very bad shopping month.

First I bought a fly thing. This was a little deathtrap for flies. It had a substance in it, you added water and hung it up in an out-of-the-way place and it attracted flies, who got in but could not get out, and then the dead flies attracted more flies, and so forth. It said to leave it up no longer than 30 days.

Oh my god. Never get one of these. Never. It didn’t even last a week.

Because it smelled TERRIBLE.

The first day it was just sort of a smell like maybe we needed to clean the dog yard, confined to the space we hung it. The second day the smell emanated to the patio. The third day it was stronger. The fourth day you could smell it from the front of the house. The fifth day, you could smell it walking past the house on the sidewalk, and it was vile.

It did kill the flies though. There must have been about two thousand in there–dead, dying, and stinking. Oh gawd.

We put on masks and double-gloved ourselves, removed it, put it in a trash sack, put that in another trash sack, and put it in the trash can (which is also in an out-of-the-way place), and we could still smell it. Our neighbors probably could still smell it. It had to go. But where? We were days away from Trash Day. It seemed like it might be some kind of crime to dump it in, say, the dumpster in a park. Finally my husband had the brilliant idea of taking the car to the car wash and dumping the sack there, and then washing the car and spraying it with Febreze. And so the saga ended. At least for us. Somewhere someone still had to deal with the Sack of Death.

But it did attract and kill flies, as promised.

The other thing was some Genie bra, which you got six for $19. Online. Of course it turned out the actual cost was something like $40, and by the time that number came up the transaction was impossible to kill, and you could return them but the procedure was quite tortuous and I was INSANE to think these things would work for me. Note that they may work for some people–they probably do–but I have issues. I didn’t even need to try the damn things on. I had hoped they would work as sports bras, but no. Straight to Goodwill.

Second the Figis mentioned by somebody. I have never seen such a tiny loaf of banana bread, or maybe it was pumpkin bread. It was the size of a cookie. I cannot believe anyone orders from them more than once.

On a more positive note, I have just bought an Oreck thingie that vacuums and mops at the same time, using steam. The vacuum is not great with pet hair but otherwise I love the thing.

19

HTC Magic (T-Mobile myTouch 3G). More expensive than an iPhone, slow camera, buggy software, missing basic utilities like a note app and a process killer, and when it came to updating the software HTC basically said, “Get a new phone!”

20

I bought a very expensive and old phrenology machine, similar to this one, because I think it’s important for my family and I to have regular psychograph readings done for our psychic well-being. Well, the 32-point readings are always quite accurate for my family members, but mine is always wrong! It consistently gives me “1” (deficient) for inductive reasoning and “5” (superior) for gullibility. Yeah, like I’m really lacking in skills of logic and very gullible!?!

I’m currently looking to replace this piece of junk with a model that works properly.