Ooh yeah. Black and Decker weed eater here…the spinny part is held on to the motor shaft with, not screws, not tabs, not clips, not cotter pins, but with friction only. A plastic housing that pushes onto a smooth polished steel shaft and is expected to remain there when rotating at a gajillion RPMs and swishing through the grass. Damn thing falls off and goes rolling across the lawn every 20 seconds like the Evil Knieval gyro motorcycle toy I had as a kid. It does better bouncing stunts than that cycle did, but the cycle cut weeds far better than this POS.
I gorilla-glued the mother onto the shaft, now it’s working.
My grandmother-in-law spent a ton of money getting us this portable shed-sized (about 10’ x 6’ x 6’) greenhouse to raise seedlings and such in. It fits together with a bunch of steel tubes and plastic connectors, nice metal shelving, and is covered with a clear tarp with zippers, tie downs, zippy doors and vents–lovely useful stuff.
However, the key functional parts of this greenhouse are all of the connectors that hold the tubes together, and the cover. Both of which are plastic.
Now, I’m an engineer who works with the stuff and I know the number one killer of any beneficial properties of plastic is UV light. Surely someone making a product designed to squat in direct sunlight for years might want to use something a tad bit resistant to UV?
A year later, and the structural connectors are as brittle as Pringles chips (most have now cracked and broken) and the cover (now with the strength of tissue paper) has torn under the withering impact of the few pinecones that have fallen on it, and the zippers have torn from their seams.
Ha! When we went to China, we brought back quite a few of those “iPods” that have external speakers and FM radios and play MP4s (things that real iPods don’t have and do). They were good gifts for friends at first and within a couple months, they all were garbaged.
The one thing I’m really happy I didn’t buy when I was there was a Wii. This was back when they first came out and were impossible to find. They were everywhere in China but knowing what I know now, they might have been as useful as those “iPods”.
My wife bought some kitchen cleaner recently, which was packaged in a clear sports bottle so you could see the purple liquid inside. As we were unpacking the groceries I almost drank it.
And what’s up with this new plastic that things come in that’s stronger than steel? No, I do not have an extra sharp pair of scissors nearby at all times. It’s impossible to get them open without scissors or a sharp knife, and I’m not even sure when this started happening.
I used to have the same problem, but then I bought a Toro. I must have lucked out and gotten the only decent one ever made, since I’ve gone through a couple of spools and have never had to do anything except bop it to get more filament. It even worked the first time when I recently replaced the spool. It is the only one I’ve ever had that actually works.
Definitely a case of YMMV. Aspirin/Tylenol/Excedrin/Advil all stop my headaches completely within a half hour. Pepto-Bismol kills my diarrhea, although I can’t remember the last time I used it for nausea.
12 years or so ago, Cisco realized that they didn’t have a small-office router to cover the newly emerging market for connectivity across ISDN. In true Cisco fashion, they found a company with a suitable product, bought the company, put a Cisco sticker on the front panel and started shipping. Normally, Cisco is pretty much top of the line. These boxes on the other hand, stank on ice.
[ol]
[li]A major point in Cisco’s favor is that all their routers run the same OS (IOS), so you can carry your knowledge with you from router model to router model. The 700 series ran “IOS700”. Which resembles IOS much in the same way a platypus resembles a quadratic equation. Basically, relearn everything.[/li][li]It was a major selling point that the routers were good at connecting Novell networks running Novel’'s protocol, IPX. This was, to a certain extent, true. But unless the routers were setup with exquisite care, they’d assume they’d better place an ISDN call for every broadcast and server keep-alive packet - something IPX has plenty of. ISDN is pay-per-call. Placing a call every 90 seconds can - well, let’s just say it ain’t cheap.[/li][li]Modifying a configuration would sometimes work, sometimes not. It was not unusual to fix a problem by saving a configuration to a file, reset the unit to factory settings, then recinstall the exact same configuration from the file - and have the router work again. Great, except when you’re connected remotely, of course.[/li][li]YMODEM software updates across the serial/console port. A network product that couldn’t be updated across the network?? [/li][li]I’m sure there’s more, but I’ve mercifully forgotten. These pieces of junk were the bane of my existence for 2 years…[/li][/ol]
I like Cisco, I like their products, I’ve been messing with their gear for 15 years. The 700 series - if it was delivered with the fuses pre-blown, it’d actually be marginally less frustrating to deal with…
It’s only done that to me the last two times I’ve taken it - I was fine with it when I was a kid. The first time it happened I thought it was a freak occurrence. After the second time I decided the whole concoction is bewitched and I’ll never go near it again.
