• @espentan@lemmy.world
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    6417 days ago

    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.

  • @Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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    5317 days ago

    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

  • @Squibbles@lemmy.ca
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    3417 days ago

    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

    • spirinolas
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      415 days ago

      This reminds me of a story with an old high school maths teacher.

      Someone said a number divided by zero was zero and he proceeded to explain why it was not. One of the class jokers went “oh yeah, well my calculator says it’s zero!”. The teachers smiles and says “surely not” and approaches the joker to see what kind of shenanigan he was pulling. And sure as hell he divides five by zero and zero is the result. The teacher, not believing his own eyes, looks at the calculator, then the joker, then the calculator again. The window was open. Figure out the rest yourself.

    • ☂️-
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      16 days ago

      ha, been there with this one. why even waste plastic, energy and man hours making it. i bet margins are horrible too.

  • @ghostlychonk@lemm.ee
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    2516 days ago

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

  • Platypus
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    2517 days ago

    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.

  • @MoonMelon@lemmy.ml
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    1817 days ago

    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.

  • @darkdemize@sh.itjust.works
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    1817 days ago

    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.

  • @Inucune@lemmy.world
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    1816 days ago

    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.

  • @BradleyUffner@lemmy.world
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    1817 days ago

    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.

  • @spittingimage@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    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?)

    • @LowtierComputer@lemmy.world
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      717 days ago

      I’ve had a pair of nail clippers break similarly, but the edge split instead of cutting my nail. I think glass clippers would have been better.

  • @Sirus@lemm.ee
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    1517 days ago

    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.

  • 2ugly2live
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    1516 days ago

    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.

  • @golden_zealot@lemmy.ml
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    1116 days ago

    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.