Exploding Plate

I thought it was cool that my friends and I randomly chose the same dishwasher. It was the Maytag Quiet Series 100.

A couple months later when my friends’ dishwasher was already breaking down, I thought it was only because they had four kids in their family, and ended up with things like Legos and cat poo going through the dishwasher cycles. But within six months of using my own dishwasher I began to notice rust on the bottom rack!

Within another few months and it became obvious that this was a serious problem.

But unfortunately it was past the end of the warantee when I finally realized this dishwasher was a piece of junk.

The bottom rack is slowly rusting away. It wasn’t like we were careless with our dishes or something. The metal is rusting through, the upright pieces are crumbling and falling off. It’s getting to where I have to rinse my dishes after I’ve washed them to get the bits and pieces of rust off.

It turns out I’m not the only one who has had problems with this dishwasher. That is, not even considering my friends.

Why has the Maytag repair man got nothing to do? I suggest he may be on his coffee break all the time because his phone isn’t working.

~ Basil

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Unrequited Consumerism: that’s what this site is really all about. It’s about the obsession that we Americans have for our products. We love them. We buy them. We can’t live without them. Every gadget and gizmo, every little trinket. Some of us buy them and then sell them all for practically nothing every few months at a garage sale, where we can “pass along the love” to someone else. Others of us buy them and throw them away.

They may last weeks, they may last months, they may last days. Sometimes they even last years, but lately, with a steady decline in quality of products in our country, that’s rare. Even household appliances scarcely last much longer than the warantee.

Most of us can’t afford to buy them. We buy them on our credit cards and go deeper and deeper into debt. We buy them and throw them away before they are paid for!

And what do I mean by unrequited? Corporate American doesn’t share our vision of what a product should be. Their love for us consumers is purely motivated by their greed. They don’t care that their products don’t work as long as they can be first to market. They don’t care that their products break down so long as more of us throw them away than ask for a refund. And we buy so much garbage we can scarcely keep track of the user manuals and receipts. It’s rare we bring anything back to the store and ask for a refund! And that’s OK with them because it doesn’t affect their bottom line. Their love for us is purely a tease.

Our landfills are full of our junk. Our houses are full of our junk. Who will save us from the abyss of our obsession?

-Basil

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How many circles do you suppose one can make from an inexpensive school-kid’s compass these days?

Well, we found out.

Apparently only six.

Yep, that’s all six of them there. Count them. My daughter likes to point out that some of them are not complete and shouldn’t count as circles at all. But let’s give this cheap-garbage product the benefit of a doubt and call it six.

So my daughter comes running up to me the other day. “Dad! Dad! I have something for your web page!” I’m thinking: “O, great! What broke now?”

So, she uses this new compass that we bought her as dutiful parents for school this year (because it was on the school supply list, but they didn’t actually need them at school), and so, she’s trying it out the other day out of boredom and discovers that it only makes defective circles because the pencil isn’t sharp.

Of course, they don’t sell them with sharp pencils - probably don’t want to be sued.

So, my daughter attempts to slide the pencil out in order to sharpen it in our nice new electric pencil sharpener (the second one we’ve gone through in as many months) and instead of sliding out, the compass crumbles in her hand.

The Crumbled Compass

The tell-tale signs were printed in tiny letters on the back of this gray-plastic piece of trash: “Made in China” - another couple bucks for the land-fill.

- Basil

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A special thanks to Tom Kyte who is generously letting me use his photo of his exploding plate here on my site.

You see I’m not the only one who has a problem with plates exploding.

Unfortunately, when my own plate exploded I was so upset I didn’t take a photo.

- Basil

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What’s the deal with cell phones these days? I had mine for six months and camera stopped working. Another couple of months and the front screen stopped working.

One day my wife calls me on the office phone at work and asks: why’d you turn off your cell phone ring? Well, I didn’t. I ask her to call me right now, so I sit there and watch the thing as it lights up and receives the call, but no ring. I check my ring-tones and, what-the-heck, it only lets me pick one or two of them and says all the other files are corrupted. So, I switch to another ring tone, and it rings fine. Then I switch back to the original again, and that one works fine too.

File not corrupted any more? Give me a break! It’s crappy workmanship. Maybe the thing was designed well, but it wasn’t implemented well, and they sold them anyway. They know that by the time it breaks down something more interesting will have caught my eye so I won’t care any more.

Nine months out of a cell phone! And I only use it maybe once or twice a day.

- Basil

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It was 7:37 AM on a Thursday morning. Thursday, October 20th to be exact. I was sitting down to eat breakfast: two nice shiny eggs, sunny-side up. I took a bite, and the yellow juice oozed out all over my plate. I took a second bite, was just putting the fork in my mouth when there was a loud sound: a simultaneous cracking and popping. I looked down at my plate: it had exploded!

The main part of my plate was in three or four large sections with bits of glass strewn all over my end of the table.

I may have sworn, I don’t remember.

This was the last straw. I had been envisioning this web site for quite some time: someplace where I talked about all the stupid crap I end up with because I want to save a little money on this or that. Well here it is: the exploding plate, an effigy to all our junk.

We Americans love buying cheap junk. Stuff that fulfills a purpose of instantaneous gratification, but ends up in the garbage heap soon thereafter. Stuff that doesn’t last because it isn’t made well. Stuff that doesn’t last because we Americans don’t seem to care: because the corporations are catering to our constant need of having the latest and greatest gadgetry at the cheapest prices.

And so this site was born…

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