One of my many victims.
Fear Me, Umbrellas of the World! Tremble, cheap, Made-in-China Sunglasses! I WILL DESTROY YOU ALLLLLLLLLL!
Ahem.
I have a little problem. With my powers of ruination. Fortunately, they only seem to damage inanimate objects, but I am rough on those objects. When I was little, I couldn’t keep hold of a house key to save my life (my parents loved that one). Later, it was hairbrushes. Seriously, I’d buy them, use them once, and they would wander off, or spontaneously combust, or something. Just…gone. I gave up on keeping track of writing utensils year ago, and have just surrendered myself to TEH SERRRRRRKELLL OF PENNNNNNNZZZ!!! It’s like Take-a-Penny-Leave-a-Penny, but on a cosmic scale.
In more recent years, it’s umbrellas and sunglasses. They blow inside out, or I sit on them, or a lens pops out, or they shred within days, or I simply leave them behind. I curse them by my very touch!
I also have horrible effects on kitchen timers. I’ve gotten a new one for Christmas every year for the past five years, at least, and they never live past May. Cheap ones or fancy, digital or mechanical, it doesn’t matter. I drop them on the floor, or in a sinkful of water, or I set them on the stove and melt them, or crush them underfoot, or dog knows what else. STOP ME BEFORE I KILL AGAIN.
Am I the only one? I hope not. For this week’s FFT, assure me that I’m not the only one who unwittingly wreaks havoc on hapless consumer goods.
I never pay more than $10 for a pair of sunglasses. They get scratched, they get sat on, they get mistakenly left behind at restaurants and other people’s homes. Whenever I see people wearing $200 pairs of sunglasses I always think, “Good luck with that.” It would be like flushing money down the toilet for me.
I moved in with a new roommate at the beginning of August, and since then, have been (accidentally) systematically destroying all of his glassware. There was the blender that fell while we were moving, the martini glass that cracked due to thermal stress when I was pouring gin, the glass pot lid that shattered when I turned on the wrong burner, and the 9×13 pan that went when I took it out of the oven and placed it straight on the counter. I’m very lucky that he finds it amusing at this point…
Honourable mention to the incident where I tried to boil-sterilize my silicone menstrual cup and ended up setting it on fire.
I have several friends who are vortexes of loss. If something is in their possession, particularly wallets, keys, and cell phones, it is sure to vanish. With the one who was a roommate, I developed good radar for finding his wallet and keys (time before cells!) but you certainly wouldn’t have wanted to have him hang onto something important for you.
I’m good at destroying umbrellas, but that is because they are the cheap ones that collapse small to fit in my backpack that die at the first strong gust of wind.
I think I have a magnetic field that puts everything I need right now just out of reach for some undefined time of inconvenience.
While I don’t usually destroy recharging cords, I seem to have limitless ability to lose them just when they are needed, and thus to waste lots of time I don’t have right then looking for them. It has made me late to more events, or gone to an event without accessibility, more than I like to admit. I finally gave up, gave in to this blindspot, and bought three more recharging cords for my cell phone, so that I could keep one in each car, one at home, and one at the office. Problem solved.
Same thing with checkbooks. I usually lose them into piles of important papers or in between purses and office/gym bags (which drives Mr. Elibard nuts), so I often have several checkbooks going at once. I don’t mind this – I can still keep my finances straight. And I lump it into the have-more-than-you-think-need-at-once strategy (see previous paragraph).
And PhDork, I love your description of your annihilation of umbrellas and sunglasses. I think of both things like pantyhose. I try not to use them unless I really have to, and then I think myself lucky if I get more than two uses out of them.
@Fex
“Honourable mention to the incident where I tried to boil-sterilize my silicone menstrual cup and ended up setting it on fire.”
I need details. I have boiled my menstrual cup but have (yet) to set it on fire.
For me it is not inanimate objects, it is plants. Outdoor plants, houseplants, plants in a plot of soil, plants in a planter. If I carefully pick one out, lovingly prepare the soil, and plant it and care for it according to instructions…. it will die. Generally, within 6 weeks.
Ironically, my mom is an amazing plant person, and buys sad dying plants for cheap at plant sales and nurses them back to health for FUN.
My mom has even picked out and planted things for me, and once she leaves, despite following her care instructions… the plant dies.
Fex, I need to hear the fiery menstrual cup story too! I microwave mine in a Pyrex cup full of water. Thus far it has done just fine, although I have burned my fingers on it a couple times after fishing it out of the water.
Ms. M – Oh, me, too! Anything that can’t tell me it’s hungry or thirsty is doomed to a painful death in my house. Hence, we have children and a dog, but no fish. I only barely managed to keep a lizard alive in its terrarium for three years once, through superhuman effort. Sometimes the poor thing went hungry much longer than it should have, until I remembered that it existed.
For me, it’s tools – wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, etc. I set them down in weird places and then can’t find them. I need multiples of everything. I do this at work, and I do it at home.
It’s completely genetic. My dad and brother do it too. We have this habit where we hold on to things instead of setting them down when we’re done, so as a result we leave them in weird places.
Plants. I am a serial plant-murderer. I’ve also somehow destroyed four or five cell phones in the past 8 months alone.
@elibard and Ms. M: me too on plants— right now I’ve got two basil plants on my window, one which is over-watered and one which is under-watered. Still not sure how I managed that one!
The flaming menstrual cup: It’s an embarassingly simple story. I put the pot on the stovetop to boil, and forgot about it until I smelled smoke (50 minutes later or so). Those things give off a good six inches of flame! This might be another good reason to invest in a microwave (and a non-glass bowl…)
I’ve been back at work for a month and a half and I have already cost the company $50 in pens, staplers and various gadgets. Not just you!
I do not own a single piece of furniture that is not scratched, chipped, dented, water-damaged, or otherwised messed up in some way. And my furniture’s not that old. I also managed to put several chips in the walls and an embarrassingly large dent in my ceiling with a bo staff.
Fex, I once turned a breast pump into a toxic mass of (BPA-Free!) plastic attempting to boil-sterilize it.
annimal, this family owns approximated fifteen tape measures of various sizes. At any given time it will take at least twenty minutes to find one.
After going through a pair of sunglasses every two months for twenty years or so, my mother was given a two hundred dollar pair by my father, to see if that raised her consciousness enough that she stopped losing them. It tripled the amount of time she kept track of them. Which is still a pretty big loss.
I’m fine with in-ground outdoor plants, but indoor plants are doomed when they move through our door. And decorative planters die an ignoble death as fast outdoors as they do indoors.
Oh this is me! I destroy things without meaning to all the freaking time. I have a habit of fiddling with something until I find a weak spot and then working on that till it cracks/splits/breaks. The thing is I tend not to notice I’m doing it until said crack/split/break. It’s a little frustrating.
Also sunglasses never last more than a few months with me. Most often I step on them. I don’t know why they’re on the floor – I’m not that untidy – but there you go.
@Fex: I have heard of melting menstrual cups before, but flames! Well done!
goodness gracious me – this is me too.
Umbrellas are a speciality that I’ll bet any place I’ve visisted with an umbrella (friends’ places, the newsagent, cafe etc) will inevitably have an umbrella that was once mine. So now if I need one will take one and of course replace for later.
In terms of not being able to locate important items… The worst thing is when I can’t remember where I put my glasses, and wear my contacts (and then it’s the opposite – need to wear contacts but can’t find them)..
I used to be kryptonite around electronic goods, and could do strange things to computer hard-drives without leaving the word processing programme. Computers regularly would have funny reactions (I once went through 4 hard drives in a year on a work computer), yet somehow the electronic goods world and mine have now reached a good working relationship, and this no longer happens with such frequency.
Definitely not. My mother and sister are famous in the family for being “hard on Things”. They are less likely to lose them and more likely to just use the hell out of them. We have three vacuum cleaners in the basement, all on their last gasp, none of them made it more than a year. I’m the one who is famous for losing stuff. Not just keys and pens, things like my entire purse, or my birth certificate (though that eventually turned up). I’m still looking for my CDs, which I took out of my car when I last cleaned it (long ago) and put Someplace Clever. Thankfully my iPod has not yet suffered the same fate…although I have lost the charger so I am musicless in the car at the moment.
I think we should put the blame where it belongs. (Sexist language at link, starting with “man” for “humankind,” but the rest is still funny, I think.