A couple years ago, a roommate who was moving out had too much stuff and wound up giving a lot of it away. At the time, I’d been making milkshakes often and with a crappy $5 milkshake maker from Aldi. It did the job… well enough, I suppose, but I was too broke to get a real blender. So when this roommate offered me their old blender, I was thrilled.
Behold!
So, as one does when acquiring a new tool, I started washing it. One of the first things I noticed about it was that it has a dumb little spigot near the base of the jar, so that you can dispense drinks or whatever. It’s stupid and badly designed, as is every spigot on every beverage container in history, but whatever. Free blender!
And then I looked into the spigot.
Inside it was a horrifying mess of decaying fruit and milk, stuck to the insides like slime on a cave. I just about hurled right then and there. I couldn’t even pull the lever to open the flow because the moving parts were all gunked together. It was all beige shit, and it was sticky, and even writing this out makes me want to die a little bit.
Cleaning it was a nightmare. The spigot unscrews from the jar, and guess what the threads of the screw look like (it’s bad)! I can’t open and close the stupid thing because the internal parts are so stuck together. Worse still, the open/close mechanism and all the internal bits were just about impossible to get to. I’m using scalding hot water, toothpicks, scrub brushes- even a toothbrush! It’s nigh impossible to get this shit out. Who the hell (besides Apple) designs a tool that can’t be cleaned?
It took me about an hour before I felt the evil had been purged- I couldn’t see any more gunk, the blender worked fine with soapy water, and when I used the spigot, nothing horrifying came out. Finally, I have a blender.
Fast forward to this week, and I want a milkshake. For the most part, I’ve been able to put this episode behind me, but I still can’t help but take the spigot off and look inside the channels every time I use it. After I’m done, and my milkshake was delicious, I go in to clean it. As I’m scrubbing, I feel something move. I rinse off all the soap, and… it turns out there was a piece I’d never noticed before. See, when I went to clean it last time, everything was so stuck together that this little screwy bit on top couldn’t move. After four years of consistent washing, it was finally loose.
I cleaned it before taking the photo so you do not have to endure my pain.
I unscrewed it, and all the internal parts came out- for easy cleaning. And guess what?
All the same shit from before was stuck to the inside like gooey webbing, plus four years of my own additions.
But hey. Free blender, right?