Asklemmy

A bit off topic; a friend of mine purchased a play mat for his kid, one of those you put on the floor with a birdseye view of roads, buildings etc., from wish (yeah, expectations weren't high to begin with). When it arrived he realized it was roughly 30 by 30 centimeters.

We went back and looked at the listing on wish, and while no dimensions were listed, the one image it had was of a kid sitting on the mat playing. That kid must've been less than 5 centimeters tall.

You know those apple slicer things that look like a wagon wheel pattern blade with a circle in the middle so you can core it and slice it in one swoop? We found one for watermelons. No shit. In hindsight, I'm guessing it was supposed to be more of a funny novelty than something actually used, but... we used it...

It made it about half an inch into the melon, then shattered like it was some kind of ACME explosion. Bits of plastic went EVERYWHERE, my melon was now wearing a crown of blades, and I was just standing there with a handle still in each hand trying to process wtf just happened, like Wile-E-Coyote still holding the steering wheel of the car that just blew up around him looking straight at the camera like "well that just fucking happened..."

0/10

Plastic clothes pins that degraded in the sunlight, turned into plastic powder.

I bought a cheap scientific calculator for math class. When I tried to multiply .5 by .5 it gave a long irrational number instead of .25. then I had to try to explain to the store clerk why that was wrong before they would accept the return

A five dollar automatic open umbrella that shot right off the shaft as soon as I hit the button.

Fly swatter that burst in to a million bits the first time I hit a fly.

A can opener from a convenience store. It was barely sharp enough to puncture the metal of the can and exploded the moment I turned the crank.

Technically, I didn't buy this, but I feel like it fits the spirit of the thread.

When I was a kid, a friend of mine gifted me an off-brand Super Nintendo controller to me for my birthday. I used it for all of about 5 minutes before it shocked the shit out of my hand and then never worked again.

Strawberrys...

On day of purchase they were fine, i put them in a fridge and next day all rotten and moldy...

I bought some "Amazon basics" trash bags once. Their sides were not even properly laminated together. Just pulling them off the roll made the sides split open. Never again.

A pack of six light bulbs. Five of them sheared right off the metal base like wet tissue when I screwed them in, just one right after the other. Fortunately the last one worked. I was a poor college kid with no transport then, so getting that pack of bulbs for my single lamp was a lot of effort, I was disappointed.

Recycled plastic bin liners. They literally split at the seams as I was peeling them off the roll.

Second place goes to a pair of cheap shoes. Literally walked the soles off them in two weeks.

Third place goes to a pair of nail clippers from a consignment store. The metal bent rather than cut through my fingernails. (Maybe it would have worked better under the red sun of my home planet?)

Measuring cup from Walmart. Packaging said dishwasher safe. It was not.

Better Homes Food chopper that couldn't be disassembled to clean it. Potato chunks got pulled up into the housing by the blades and just rotted there with no way to access it. The exact same model is still sold in stores.

A friend of mine made an online store and he started selling ~~e-waste~~ ahem… various affordable electronics. He wanted me to test a Chinese tablet, and I said yes. This was back in the day when Android Honeycomb was a thing and iPad 2 was a reasonable option, so even the best tablets weren’t that great.

I got the tablet, charged the battery, booted it up, and it was just barely ok. It worked, but it was really slow. I mean, like slower than my first Android phone. This was not even last gen hardware. It was clear that ~~some~~ all corners were cut. The storage, CPU, RAM, bandwidth etc. Every component was the slowest one available.

Anyway, the testing went slowly, as you would expect. It ran out of battery very quickly, because of course it did. Why put large cells or even mediocre quality cells in a cash grab like this. So, I charged it up and continued testing later until it ran out of battery again. Rinse and repeat.

After a few days of testing, It just didn’t boot up any more. Apparently some of those cheap components just couldn’t take the heat that comes with using a battery powered device. Rust in pieces! I hope this abomination gets ground to shreads and drowned in sulfuric acid.

I returned the tablet to my friend and I never heard from it again.

I once bought cheap headphones from amazon without reading reviews. They literally fell apart in my hands as I took them out the packet.

At this point, pretty much anything purchased on Amazon. Nowadays even stuff that looks like it's from a legit seller can end up being a knockoff from a scam seller because of their warehouse storage logistics. Or they sell a high quality item long enough to get good reviews on the listing, then switch it out with some cheap piece of shit to take in the dough until the rating is tanked, lather rinse repeat. It's just becoming more and more like Wish/Temu where the listings are straight up lies and they just rely on people not wanting to do through the trouble of a return.

My wife once bought me a Siar Wars action figure from e bay. Yes that's right Siar Wars. He fall apart immediately upon taking out of the box.

This was a few years back, before I knew this was even possible, but a portable hard drive off of Amazon. Not only was it sharp on all edges, it was only programed to show the storage without actually having it. I spent an evening "moving" docs from a dying laptop, only to plug it in the next day two find a fraction of what I thought I moved over.

Also, a yoga mat that disintegrated when I went to do a plank. Just pressing my hands into it was enough for it to flake apart.

A cheap USB 32GB pendrive. It would barely reach 1MB/s transfer speeds and started corrupting files almost instantly.

I bought a size of pizza from a food truck in DC and it was so bad I threw it away. Which is saying a lot for pizza

I purchased a hammer at a dollar store once, just to see how bad it was.

I found out when the head of the hammer flew off on a back-swing and put a whole in the wall. The neck of the hammer was made of flimsy, hollow tube metal and the head had only been tack-welded on in 2 places.

A knockoff iPhone charger from China. I plugged it into my computer and it literally caught fire.

A T-shirt a friend gave me when going back from China. It had a small smell, so I put it in washing machine. It end up completely torn in several part... I didn't,t even had a chance to wear it once 🤣

Good thread to promote !buyitforlife@slrpnk.net

Purchases from Wish. A pair of block heels where the heel length didn't match the shoe arch. Wearing them meant constantly falling backwards. It was so comically bad, the seller gave me a refund and said don't bother sending them back.

A Gorillaz t-shirt, also from Wish. The picture on the website looked ok. However, what I received was so awful I thought it was a prank. The white shirt had what I assumed was yellow rust stains. It looked like a rag kicked underneath a disgusting kitchen frier and left there for years.

Some of the seams were on the outside and some were on the inside. The print itself was heavily pixilated, as if someone took an internet forum avatar image, blew it up, and stuck it onto a shirt.

Might not take #1 spot, but is definitely up there. A pair of Levi's jeans that were worn through in 2-3 days.

We bought a shower mat that reeked of plastic offgassing, so we left it outside to air out for a month, and it still smelled like shit, so we threw it away.

I bought an ouya. I remember just about everything sucked. It's the thing that came into mind.

A Logitech gaming headset, I think it was G332. My main headphones broke, and I needed some ASAP, so I went to the local store and bought them as backup ones. The black paint on the padding started peeling off almost immediately and it got everywhere, like sand.

Microsoft Surface.

In no particular order:

The Alcantara keyboard cover stated delaminating and the top layer started peeling off just from the friction of resting your hands on it. Started happening within months of getting it.

Battery failed after just a few years of daily use, I'm talking completely refused to charge, you unplug the charger even after leaving it in overnight and the screen goes black instantly. And while most laptops can run just fine with a dead battery as long as you keep it plugged in at all times, not the Surface. The little magnetic connector supplies so little power that the device is forced to down clock to below 1 GHz to keep from shutting down due to undercurrent. And sometimes it shuts down anyway because fuck you.

It's also glued so tight, and the front glass is so thin, that you basically can't open it without destroying the screen in the process.

Also, the magnetic charge connector started having contact issues around the same time the battery was starting to fail, so the moment you bump it, it disconnects and causes the device to turn off. It also just refuses to connect half the time when you plug it in. Gotta jiggle it, blow into it, shake and hit it a bunch of times, and pray. I'm pretty sure it's the tablet's side that's the problem because changing chargers did nothing, and the charger that came with the problem tablet worked fine on another Surface. Gotta love when companies make the fragile part of the connector apart of the $2000 device that's sealed shut with glue and put the more robust part on the cheap and easily replaceable charger.

It's also really bad at going to sleep. Way too many times I've closed it, put it in my bag, and when I take it out it's scalding hot and the battery is nearly drained. It's your own device Microsoft, running 100% your own software. How the hell do you fuck it up?!

Worst. Tablet. EVER. And probably ruined any potential that laptop-replacement tablets once had, which is a shame because I still like the tablet form factor.

The thing that immediately comes to mind is a cheap telescoping fly swatter. . Old radio antenna style shaft / handle. The part that’s supposed to swat the flies was a massive square that was way too heavy and had so much drag that it would flop and never hit flat and was too slow because of it. Never once was able to kill a fly and after about the fifth try the handle broke in half and the top flew off launching into the great Beyond. Pretty sure it’s still lodged behind a couch somewhere.

A replacement PCV valve for my car.

Car was around 100,000 miles, figured it was a good time to do a big refresh & replace a bunch of stuff. Spark plugs, belts & hoses, fuel & air filters, fluids, etc etc... While I was at the parts store, guy suggested I also replace the PCV valve. But, it turned out the only one he had in stock was the store brand. $4, sure whatever. Got it home, took the factory one off the car, and sure enough it was gummed up kinda bad. But went to put the new one on, and it just about collapsed in my hands. It was so flimsy, kinda like a drinking straw. Ended up cleaning the factory one & putting it back on, threw the new one away.