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.

I did buy a number of fake flash drives, so they’re definitely up there. Luckily I’ve always won the disputes and got my money back from every one of them.

There were also a number of headphones whose sound was so fucking bad, listening to stuff off my phone’s speakers was better

Microsoft Surface.

In no particular order:

The Al Cantera 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.

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

Cheap mini Bluetooth keyboard. It kept disconnecting and missing keystrokes. Input latency was awful too. 2010s Bluetooth was so bad

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

Just about anything by Betterware. The one that sticks in my mind was the non-stick stick-on hook that lasted for all of a minute before falling off under its own weight. I ended up second guessing how the thing they were selling could possibly go wrong, and if I could think of something then I wouldn’t get it.

There is one Betterware item that’s lasted the years though. A hair trap for the sink. It’s a metal disk with holes punched in it. Hard for that not to work, really.

Also, increasingly, tat off Scamazon.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.