Hasta La Ideas

All Unitasker Wednesday posts are jokes — we don’t want you to buy these items, we want you to laugh at their ridiculousness. Enjoy!

I like candles, especially the ones that smell nice. My favorite is Votivo’s prairie sage scented candle. My friend Susan bought me one about 12 years ago and it has been my favorite ever since (I think I’m on my ninth one, I’m a creature of habit).

Maintaining candles is super easy. You light them, let them burn, blow them out, let them cool, and then put them into storage until the next time you want to use them. It’s the way people have been using candles since someone came up with the idea of putting a wick into wax. There is nothing difficult about candles. Heck, even making candles is easy.

So when reader Rita emailed me a link to suggest this unitasker, I was a wee-bit confused as to why candles should be made more difficult. See, in my experience, the wick burns when you light it on fire. It takes care of itself. There is no need for a Wick Trimmer because the flame will destroy the wick all on its own:

Sure, sometimes you might want to turn the candle over when it’s cool and dust off a few, stray charred wick remains, just to get them out of the way. I guess if you really didn’t like the look of any charred wick bits that are left behind you could cut them off with your multifunctional nail trimmers. But, if you’re like me, neither of these things are all that pressing of tasks since they’re only candles and eventually the wick bits will go away on their own.

My confusion over trying to make candles more difficult than they need to be doesn’t stop with the wick trimmer. While I was on the page for the wick trimmer, I noticed the “customers who bought this item also bought” section and came across another peculiar candle device. This one is the Waxi Taxi:

With this device, you can move votive candles around your home while they’re lit! Because carrying fire is REALLY smart. (No, it’s actually not smart. I was using sarcasm. How are there people who are unaware transporting lit candles is a bad idea?) Since long matches exist, there is never a need to light a candle before putting it somewhere. And, since it’s incredibly easy to blow out a candle and then move it, this one really takes the cake for pointlessness.

Who knew that candle accoutrements was a thing?! Think I’ll just stick with my method of not maintaining them with any special tools and enjoying them all the same.

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All Unitasker Wednesday posts are jokes — we don’t want you to buy these items, we want you to laugh at their ridiculousness. Enjoy!

Instead of putting the product name in the headline and immediately telling you what this week’s item is used for, I thought it would be fun to have you guess:

What do you think? It looks like a fork, right? But it’s not a regular fork. Gotcha! No, it’s a very special tool for only one purpose. What could it be?!

Surprise! It’s a Potato Fork!

You use it to grab potatoes out of boiling water instead of using your bare hands. What’s that? You never use your bare hands to retrieve potatoes out of boiling water (because you have a brain in your head)? You just dump the pot of water and potatoes into a strainer and drain off the water? Or, you use a slotted spoon or a wire skimmer to retrieve those hot potatoes out of the water? Wow, you are resourceful! I can’t believe you didn’t buy a specialty fork for $21 to do this very specific task for you. You really are amazing.

And, you look very handsome/beautiful today, too.

Thanks for playing our game of Mystery Unitasker, and we appreciate reader Karen for sharing this Unitasker with us.

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All Unitasker Wednesday posts are jokes — we don’t want you to buy these items, we want you to laugh at their ridiculousness. Enjoy!

If you read the headline for this post, you may have seen the single word “rope” and thought, “rope is a multitasker, Erin is off her rocker this week.” And, I would agree, rope is quite versatile. But, this is not just a 30-foot piece of abaca rope for $60. No, this is 30′ of abaca rope for $60 with a knot in the middle of it, which is totally different. It’s Pottery Barn’s Tug of War Rope:

Unless you’re a gym teacher, where Tug of War might be played three or four times a year (class battles on a field day? in the weeks before graduation for a match between the sixth graders and the teachers? on a day when there is a substitute and you didn’t leave a proper lesson plan? some time when you’re really interested in seeing how well the school’s insurance policy covers injuries that land tykes in hospitals?), I can’t imagine there is a strong need for Pottery Barn’s Tug of War Rope in your life. If you’re in charge of planning the next family reunion and Tug of War has come to mind as a “fun” possibility, know that the same rope — natural abaca rope from the Philippines — is way cheaper when you don’t buy it from Pottery Barn. For the same price as this 30′ rope, you can get 100′ feet of abaca rope on Amazon. You could then have THREE Tug of War ropes! (That is, you’ll have Tug of War ropes once you tie knots in their middles and on the ends. Those knots make all the difference!)

To be fair, the abaca rope is good quality rope. I’m sure after playing Tug of War with it, you could untie the middle knot (gasp!) and use it again for other things. However, if you’re someone who regularly needs to use rope — say, you’re a villain who ties damsels to railroad tracks only to be foiled by do-gooder Canadian Mounties — my guess is you already own some that could substitute for a Tug of War Rope. Just don’t forget to tie that knot in the middle, obviously.

Thanks to reader Monica for finding this awesome Unitasker and sharing it with us.

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All Unitasker Wednesday posts are jokes — we don’t want you to buy these items, we want you to laugh at their ridiculousness. Enjoy!

Glitter is one of the most evil craft products in existence. Most often, its users are children under the age of 10 who have no business decorating with the vile stuff. Once a glitter container is opened, glitter infects every possible thing it comes near. Does anyone ever garner enough joy from these sparkly bits to warrant the clean up afterward because those sparkly bits get everywhere? My guess is: no.

In an attempt to make glitter less awful, Martha Stewart has created a tacky (in the adhesive sense) cheesecloth and named it the Glitter Cleanup Cloth:

The thing is, though, it doesn’t work. Some glitter gets stuck to the tacky part and then you just use the now-sparkly cloth to push the rest of the glitter around. You end up spreading the glitter, like a bacteria or virus. And, since you can’t wash the cloth, after you’re done “cleaning,” you then become the proud owner of a cloth covered in glitter. Fun! (Actually: not fun. Some of that glitter will eventually fall off and mess up even more of your home.)

Want to know what cleans up glitter well? Vacuum and tape. You vacuum up as much as possible and then you use a strip of tape to pick up the rest. For those rare moments you choose to use glitter (obviously when you have amnesia and have forgotten how messy the stuff is), you don’t have need for a specialized cloth. You probably already own a vacuum and roll of tape, so now is the time to put them to their best use possible and get rid of the glitter.

Honestly, I think the best advice I can give you is to not use glitter. Whomever invented it was clearly a mad scientist insisting on overtaking the world with sparkle. Thanks to the person who tipped me off to this unitasker — sadly, I cannot find our original communication, but I am still very appreciative!

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All Unitasker Wednesday posts are jokes — we don’t want you to buy these items, we want you to laugh at their ridiculousness. Enjoy!

Once upon a time, I was a child who had backyard birthday parties. At these birthday parties, we would play games many kids love to play. There was always the water balloon toss, the three-legged race, and the egg on a spoon race. My parents would decorate the backyard with streamers and balloons and everyone would have simple fun.

With my son’s birthday on the horizon, I thought about throwing a similar party for him and went online to look for streamers and balloons. I then made the mistake of scrolling through the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section on one of the Amazon pages to see if I was inadvertently leaving anything out of my order. It was then I realized one of my favorite childhood birthday games had been ruined (RUINED I SAY) — Egg and Spoon Race:

Gone are the days of using actual spoons from your kitchen drawer and hard boiled eggs from real chickens for the egg on a spoon race. Now, there are plastic spoons, plastic eggs, and bean bag “yolks.” You can’t even eat the plastic egg after you drop it like you can the hard boiled egg!

Farewell, fun and easy childhood birthday parties. Sigh.

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