Domestic appliances - are they all junk?

Blame Our Appliances

Many household appliances contribute to our happiness—can we say too much about the coffee maker, the juicer? —but many more do not. In fact, if we want to be honest, we have to admit that it’s this latter group of appliances that contributes more than anything, including sickness and death, to our unhappiness, our bleakest days of sadness and melancholy. Here is a brief list of the five common household appliances that have contributed least to the sum total of human happiness:

First, the coffee-bean grinder. All the long, painful minutes spent listening to that cacophonous roar, that inhuman growling cannot, as we so clearly know, ever be retrieved. Let us face facts: those minutes are gone forever. Yes, coffee beans must somehow be ground, but, can we say with all sincerity that this appliance was the best solution to that simple question of grinding? Has it ever made us happy? Has it not, instead, made our once-quiet hours dismal with its incessant noise, as if a stampede of growling polar bears had taken over our kitchens?

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Second, the vacuum cleaner. We may have fooled ourselves into thinking that this little machine has saved us hours and hours of cleaning-time, but then we’ve forgotten the additional hours and hours of cleaning the cleaning machine. It’s true that we may now remove dirt from the living-room floor at record-breaking rates. It’s also true that trying to remove dirt from vacuum bags (as misleadingly simple as it sounds) has caused many a man and woman to lose their previously-sane minds. We are all more than aware of vacuum cleaners that use no bags, vacuums with only a plastic belly that begs to be emptied, but these are even worse, since they require even more disassembly and reassembly than ever before.

Third, the portable fan. If it’s small enough to be portable, then it’s too small to be stationary, and if it’s too small to be stationary, then it’s too small to work properly. Need we say more? What contributes to happiness less than humidity? What contributes to unhappiness more than a useless appliance?

Fourth, the video cassette recorder. Again, we must get over our previously unquestioned assumptions about what has and what has not made us happy. Video cameras may have given us the ability to record our daughters’ ballet recitals, but, at the same time, video cameras must, more often than not, be to blame for our missing those same recitals. How many precious events have we averted our eyes from, in order to deal with this dumb malfunctioning device? How many times have we tried to record our child’s first steps, only to miss seeing those first steps because of technological disaster? If anything, video cassette recorders have so depleted our happiness sum that it’s a wonder we have anything left.

Fifth and finally, the freezer. Yes, the freezer. And for one simple reason: we leave pints (or gallons) of ice cream in the freezer (some prefer chocolate, some prefer vanilla), and the freezer leaves layers of little ice crystals across the surface of that same ice cream. And what could be worse? Some say that this disaster could be averted by altering slightly the temperature of that same freezer, but have we not tried this, and have we not moved too far in the opposite direction and ended up with a messy mass of melted ice cream? Our freezers have, time after time, ruined our ice cream, and it’s time to stop making excuses for them, and for all the other appliances that have not, no, not at all, contributed one bit to our sum total of human happiness.