If you’re not an easy person to buy gifts for, don’t be surprised if you receive some weird gadgets this Christmas. And if they’re anything like the gadgets my dad used to bring home from shopping, don’t be surprised if you never use those gadgets.
My dad was the main grocery shopper in our household. Mum didn’t drive so it made sense for him to collect the items on the shopping list she wrote. And Dad was an excellent shopper. It was a very rare shopping trip from which he returned without the listed item or a suitable substitute.
In fact Dad would not only get everything on the list, but a few things besides. And more often than not, these things would be gadgets. Little things he’d see on display and think, “Ooh, that would be a handy thing to have.” Or, “This could be useful.”
The trouble was, the gadgets were rarely useful, in practice at least. Among the gadgets I can recall Dad bringing home were:
• A cheese slicer – a little hand-held metal device with a thin strip of razor-sharp wire that promised to give you perfect, even slices of cheese. I seem to remember it giving as perfectly sliced fingertips.
• A honeycomb-shaped plastic doodad that you could dip into your jar of honey and spread onto your sandwich. It looked good but basically did the same thing as a butter knife, and not as well.
• A metal ‘ice-cube’ ball on a stick. This was perhaps my favourite. It was a shiny silver metal ball at the end of a shiny silver metal stick. Pop it in the freezer and the next time you needed to add ice to a drink – Bingo! – you just placed the little ball on a stick into your glass. If I remember correctly, the one Dad brought home went into freezer and remained there for the rest of our fridge’s life. When it finally did come out, the little shiny ball at the end of the stick was covered in rust spots!
Do you have someone in your household who brings home gadgets that promise much but rarely, if ever, deliver?
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