Timsup2nothin
Deity
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2013
- Messages
- 46,737
For some reason this came to mind...maybe the self driving car conversation...dunno. Anyway, I got to thinking about things that are just terrible designs. I had a knife one time that to release the blade so you could fold it you basically had to have your finger covering the slot the blade folded into, for example. Release, start folding, move finger before it gets cut was a perpetual challenge. But for my entire long life this one is the top, by a large margin:
When my kids were young teens I saw this thing called a "snow racer" and we just had to have it. It had two ski style runners and a seat big enough for two people to sit on. In front was a steering wheel attached to a third ski thing. When you sat on it pretty much all your weight was on the two fixed skis, which promptly carved parallel grooves straight down the hill. Since there was no weight on the front turning the front ski accomplished basically nothing.
So you're on this thing with minimal friction surface on the snow, and it is accelerating basically at full gravity in a straight line towards wherever it happens to be pointed. But they supply "brakes"! You push these pedals and it drives a metal claw down into the snow. The claw, like the ski in the front, has hardly any weight over it so it can't really do much to slow the thing down, but it serves a function pretty much like the glasses in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It throws snow up into your face so you won't see the inevitable coming and maybe won't panic.
After one day I figured that this thing was such a product liability nightmare that I had been "lucky" to stumble across it during a very brief interval between the invention and the certain demise of anyone selling them, and even luckier that no one was hospitalized by the time my wife got wind of it. But I just looked and there are a number of different brands of this death dealing device available on the internet.
Anyone seen anything to top that?
When my kids were young teens I saw this thing called a "snow racer" and we just had to have it. It had two ski style runners and a seat big enough for two people to sit on. In front was a steering wheel attached to a third ski thing. When you sat on it pretty much all your weight was on the two fixed skis, which promptly carved parallel grooves straight down the hill. Since there was no weight on the front turning the front ski accomplished basically nothing.
So you're on this thing with minimal friction surface on the snow, and it is accelerating basically at full gravity in a straight line towards wherever it happens to be pointed. But they supply "brakes"! You push these pedals and it drives a metal claw down into the snow. The claw, like the ski in the front, has hardly any weight over it so it can't really do much to slow the thing down, but it serves a function pretty much like the glasses in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It throws snow up into your face so you won't see the inevitable coming and maybe won't panic.
After one day I figured that this thing was such a product liability nightmare that I had been "lucky" to stumble across it during a very brief interval between the invention and the certain demise of anyone selling them, and even luckier that no one was hospitalized by the time my wife got wind of it. But I just looked and there are a number of different brands of this death dealing device available on the internet.
Anyone seen anything to top that?
