For example, I’m incredibly confused about how you’re supposedly to measure liquid laundry detergent with the cap. At least the kind that I have sits on it’s side, so if you measure it with the cap it just leaks everywhere and makes a mess.
Or at my parents house they have a bag of captain crunch berries that has a new design, where instead of zipping along the top of the bag like normal, it has a zipper in the front slightly beneath the top. That way when you poor it you can’t see what you’re doing cuz the bag is in the way. Like what the heck who’s idea was that?
Alec from Technology Connections is known for his extensive rants about household appliances: https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections
As for me, I’m just trying to avoid things in general, and things I don’t enjoy in particular. Perhaps the only things that I find annoying at my home are:
- An awful flow-through gas water heater, which requires me to wait for like a minute before water gets up to temperature every time I need hot water (I’d go with an electric one myself, but unfortunately I’m a renter for now). It’s also a poor design because it’s going to fuck over humanity in a couple decades via climate change.
- Packaging on almost all processed food. I don’t need everything I buy to be in a plastic bag. It’s an incredibly poor design because it is almost always non-recyleable, either because it has a thin foil layer or it’s a mix of plastics or both, filling the landfills forever and contaminating everything with microplastics.
- Poor window frame design, combined with inevitable building settling, has resulted in a cracked window twice within the last year.
I have many more gripes about things, some of the most prominent:
- Most modern smartphones just suck. Gimme back the headphone jack, an SD card slot, and a back that I can open with my fingernails! (thankfully my current phone has all of those despite being only a couple years old and very cheap)
- Generally everything that has a battery which I can’t replace
- Bluetooth headphones without a headphone jack or at least audio-over-USB are an awful design, it would cost the manufacturer like a dollar do add that functionality that can come in really handy and yet they don’t
- Fuck clothes without pockets!
- Cheap plastic crap from wish.com or similar that’s designed to fail after one use, it just shouldn’t exist. I hope CPC bans this shit soon. (although I find it fun to pull out broken christmas lights from recycling, fix them and then get free christmas lights for every New Year’s)
- “Teflon” or similar frying pans. Just get a cast iron one. Lasts forever, doesn’t poison you, also allegedly enriches your food with iron
There are many, but my current bugbear is the wireless Apple mouse. It has a built in rechargeable battery and and a tiny little port for you to plug the recharging cable in. The port is mounted on the bottom of the mouse rendering it useless while it’s being charged. I guess it’s to make it look nicer but it’s so stupid.
That was a design decision by Steve Jobs to keep people from using them as wired mice.
If this is true what a dumb reason. Basically decided to make a device that could be used 100% of the time unusable for some fraction of time just because it looks the way he wanted it too.
Planned obsolescence. When the battery finally dies, you can’t use it wired.
It’s like that to push you to buy two of them.
When I was a kid cereal didn’t have no zippas! We rolled up the one end of the bag and watched it partially unfurl when we let go, and we were satisfied with that.
Roll the bag. Flip the box upside down. Put it in going up. Hold it in place and flip the box back over. Gravity holds the bag closed. This is a bad idea if anyone else accesses the box and isn’t on the same page as you.
I just fold it up and use a clothes peg ha ha
Y’know, I bought a bag of bag clips from Ikea years ago and I’m only now realising that they’re less suited to the job than a clothes peg. Smart.
How do you hold closed the bag that holds the bag clips?
Stupid question. With a bag clip bag bag clip, obviously.
Laptops with no intake dust filters.
Actually, no, any computer with fans that doesn’t have a dust filter is a terrible design.
My laptop doesn’t have dust filters, but the fan almost never runs anyway. Like the heatsink is way overbuilt for the CPU it’s attached to. It’s actually quite nice. I’ve never seen it hit 70 degrees. I’ve cleaned it maybe three times since 2016. It really only spins the fan up when I’m watching 60 fps YouTube videos or playing games. And even then, it kicks hard for a very short time and shuts off again.
And again, I bought this thing nine years ago. It’s just a little Acer. And it’s not even a nice one. I paid like 500 bucks for this thing.
Now, my wife’s MacBook that she games on…yeah, I need to figure out how to get the back off so it can get a proper dusting. Fuck you, Apple. Let me work on my stuff, dammit.
A twelve year old computer in 2013 would have been utterly useless. Doesn’t matter how good is was in 2001 it would die under even a modest 2013 workload. But a decent computer from 2013 is still useful today. Not for triple-A gaming, VR, or 8K video editing, but still a decent productivity and media machine. I just bought my first handheld gaming PC and I made sure it had eGPU support since that’s the likely bottleneck in the future (i7 and 32GB RAM, so that should be good for a long while) and I fully intend to get a decade out of it. There’s no real appetite to upgrade your machine regularly any more, and the manufacturers hate that.
US can openers. In other countries, they cut the sides of the can not the top, so the lid has no chance of falling in while dulling the edges. It also allows them to be much smaller and easier to use.
You can buy good can openers and bad ones in any country.
I bought this can opener after watching a Technology Connections video, and I kinda love my can opener.
Came here to say can opener too. Not for the same reason as you mentioned just that more often than not a can opener is just plain shoddy. Slips, doesn’t fully cut, hard to grip, etc….
I have a truck where the oil drain plug is directly over the axle. I have to strap an offset funnel under the drain to get it to not splash all over the fuck, and of course, it’s not easy to get that stay put so inevitably I have oil everywhere. Same truck has the oil filter tucked up where I need a special oil filter wrench with a ratchet and extensions to remove it, and when you pull the filter out, you have to tip it so it spills the oil inside everywhere.
I had an idea a long time ago of a website where you can crowdfund a private investigator to find engineers that do shit like this, and a crew to go over to their house and beat them halfway to death.
I learned long ago when something like this bothers me that it is irrational to get angry at objects, then I connected I am not angry at the object, I am angry at the dumb ass turd who designed it.
btw, I drill a hole in my oil filter before I remove it to drain it so it doesn’t spill all over the front of my engine.
Maybe all engineers should have to sign their work. Like have their license number or something embossed on it. That way we can find them and inform them of their idiocy.
I will often drive a screwdriver into the bottom a filter, but this one is impossible to get to and even if I did, it would dribble on the exhaust pipe.
cups, glasses, bowls, anything that doesn’t have a spout and makes a mess every time you transfer liquids
Every time I spill something I’m reminded how much better lab glassware is (beakers etc)
Garlic crushers. All of them suck.
I’ve found one that seems to suck less. It is at least sensibly designed, easy to clean, and hefty enough where I’m not going to break it. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08WHLDMNX
Buy jarlick. Join us in convenient garlic-in-a-jar nirvana.
Keep looking. Find one with a thick stainless steel construction. I have two that you could break a window with.
I switched to using a microplane (or similar super fine grater) for garlic a few years back, it’s far easier to clean and I like it for ginger, nutmeg, hard cheeses etc.
Any mug that has a really hemispherical, smooth handle. You put a hot beverage in there, and the weight is enough to make your fingers slide down the handle, and then you burn yourself on the main body of the mug unless you really squeeze.
Any faucet that just barely sticks out over the sink, so you have to touch the back of the sink to wash your hands (british sinks are even worse, though).
Any time there’s a ready meal from the supermarket and for some reason the adhesive is way stronger than the plastic film. You end up with loads of bits of film just sort of stuck to the rim of it. Super annoying.
I’ve dropped brands for that shit
Got a local one that puffs up to like 3x height in the microwave though and that pulls off a lot of the adhesive.
I’m going to go with that horrendous, non-absorbent, 1/8th ply toilet paper that gets stocked in public and office bathrooms.
I’m on Team Bidet now, so it doesn’t bother me as much as it once did… but the stuff should not exist.
I’m guessing that one day, the people who buy the stuff will figure out that it they’re not winning if it costs one-third the price of normal TP when everyone has to use ten times more of it, but who knows when that day will happen. Because it hasn’t happened yet.
Even with a bidet that paper sucks. Drying off you ass with it leaves so much paper crumble everywhere that you’ll need the bidet again…
Okay Team Bidet, how are they actually supposed work?
- Spray bum
- Pat dry with TP
The tricky part with phase 1 is managing water pressure. Too little is ineffective. Too much blasts shit everywhere.
Do a test squirt into the bowl so you know what you’ve got to work with. Start with low pressure to get most of it, adjust angle of necessary, then hit it with everything.
I get that’s the principle, but how long are you supposed to spray for? How much pressure? Is there a trick to it? In my own limited experience, it doesn’t actually do much more than dampen the poo.
You know you’re supposed to use the bidet after you’re done pooping, right?
Some toilets have a perfectly round bowl so they don’t stick out as far and take up less bathroom floor space - and they work fine, but only in bathrooms that anticipate the vast majority of its occupants to be equipped with a vagina. For those of us rocking a penis, those fucking toilets are horrible - sitting on that damn thing requires you to contort your junk around like some sausage-Houdini as you’re sitting, so that you can guide it through the remaining 2 square inches of open space not occupied by your legs or ass. Then when you’re actually seated, you still have to sit there and awkwardly hold the thing so it stays pointed straight down.
Fuck up any part of that, and the tip of your dick hits the seat or the inside of the bowl.
…and they must be like $3 cheaper than an oval toilet or something, cuz 99% of US apartments seem to be equipped with the round, vagina-only toilets.
Oval bowls are the way. No matter what’s in your pants, it gets the job done without the significantly increased biohazard risk.
I guess in fairness, the problem isn’t with their design, it’s with the people who purchase the toilets treating them as sex-neutral when no the fuck they aren’t!
I am a vagina owner from birth, I never imagined the toilet bowl shape would pose an issue to penis owners. From reading your comment I’m still unsure of which toilet bowls you’re talking about, I would appreciate if you (or anyone, really) could point to images of both so I, and potentially others, can compare. TIA
Space consideration is a bit more obvious with the seat though
How pronounced the difference is feels like it varies but the rounded ones are frequently just way too tiny.
I knew about different bowl / seat shapes, but I never thought about the issues for folks who have a penis.
Very enlightening. Thank you for bringing it up! It’s very interesting.
Thanks for those! Clear as day.
Tape a dildo to your vulva now sit down on a round bowl and see if it touches the rim. Now imagine you have to pee while taking a poop and you now have to shove the end down so it pees into the bowl. Do this without touching the rim.
It was the shape of the toilet what I couldn’t picture, not the usage
Humidifiers.
It’s just a pool of water with a little nebulizer and a fan to blow the mist out a chimney.
Trouble is, they’re all made by the fucking plague demon Nurgle with the sole purpose of aerosolizing mold and bacteria by having the tiniest nooks and crannies than cannot be reached to be physically cleaned.
And before I get the “you gotta clean it with vinegar every week” comment, two points:
- You don’t soak your hands in soap and rinse them off and call them clean. You gotta scrub them.
- Am I supposed to fill a 5 gallon bucket with vinegar to soak the whole water tank every week? Because the chimney goes right through that bitch.
I’ve taken to using an old cake pan, a desk fan, and a towel. Fill up the pan with water, stick one end of the towel in the water, drape and clip the other end to the fan and let it sit running for a few days. Before the towel gets gross, toss it in the laundry when it’s dry and grab another towel
It works so well I’m completely confused as to how/why there isn’t a commercialized product like that, it completely solves the cleaning/highschool biology experiments problem
That’s pretty much a swamp cooler
You better start showing Plague Daddy, Prince of Decay, God of Chaos Nurgle some goddamn respect
Don’t use a mist humidifier. They suck. Use an evaporative one and add bacteriostat to the water.
Mine is a tub of water with a wick in it. It has a fan that blows air across the wick. That’s it.
i have a venta lw45. same principle, but instead of a wick, it has these rotating disks that the water sticks to (with a little soap in the water). Works incredibly well, still uses next to no energy (<8W) and the disks are super easy to clean. It’s a beast, goes through 9 liters of water in a bit over a day. All the parts are easily accessible for maintenance and there’s replacement parts if anything ever were to break (though i havent needed those yet).
the disks are especially nice when you have hard water, the calcium can be a pain to remove from a wick, but you can put the venta plastic disks (and lower housing, if you can fit it) in the dishwasher to get them good as new. And calcium does not stick to them weld, so a quick rinse under a strong showerhead is usually enough to clean the disks. Definitely one of the best appliance purchases i ever made.
Countertops should be just a couple of inches higher, they are calibrated for a 1930s housewife but most of us aren’t 5’2" and it’s easier to stand on a stool if it’s too high than to stoop because it’s too low.
OP I hate those low ziploc bag openings too, they are so stupid.
Or you could be my house, previously owned by a maniac, with counters in the kitchen at 3 different heights. I wish I could say that was the stupidest thing the previous owner did.
Weird take on counter tops.
Things designed for many people to use need to be the best height for most people. I feel confident that most countertops are the best height for most people.
I acknowledge that they are too low for a tall person, and that they’re too high for a short person.
You’re pretty much just saying you want things to be designed for you and that everyone else should adapt to you, rather than you having to make concessions for others like everybody does.
I am tallish for a woman, at least where I live, but not for a person. Countertops are too low for the average height person, they are still built at the 36" height that was in my old house, built in the 1920s. We are taller on average now, and both men and women use the kitchen now.
Yeah, why do people blow their noses into PAPER when you can just go to the bathroom sink and hork in your hands, and then wash up afterwards??? Why would people walk around with dried boogies on they face when they can wash?? Why? Why, Mister Anderson, why, why?
Just tell me that you turn the water on pre-hork instead of touching the fixtures with hork hands, and I’m totally fine with your suggestion.
Of course! You need the hork-lube to do it right
Because it is not always possible… Also, take your time to clean the sink afterwards or you might get in trouble with you SO (I am speaking out of experience).
Or just going outside and ejecting that puppy without touching anything except the other side of your nose. Farmer blow FTW.