Squishy Stuff that Doesn’t Work

Do you ever buy stuff on the internet, and then come over all disappointed when it arrives and does not perform remotely as advertised?

Don’t get me started on the tragic story of the sea pixies, or that Chinese Dance program that they’ve been overhyping for years with giant advertising billboards.

I’m a total sucker for advertisers. We New Zealanders are trained from birth to trust everyone. Which works fine in a country where the police do not carry guns, there are no snakes, and the most dangerous animal is the small, non-scary, mildly poisonous Katipo spider which no-one I know has ever seen, ever. Effectively, it doesn’t exist.

So New Zealand is a super safe place, and its people are typically friendly and not dangerous. Even the orcs are extinct, thanks to Aragorn and his intrepid gang.

All of which engenders a culture of trust.

But out here in the big wide world of Unique Selling Propositions and Minimum Viable Products, trusting everyone as a default is not always a winning strategy. Especially when someone on the internet is trying to fool you into buying a device or substance that does not live up to the exaggerated claims made by those nice-seeming people in the advertisements.

Which brings me to Squishy Stuff that Doesn’t Work!

Like any normal person, I occasionally feel the urge to stick something to my wall. However, none of the obvious methods seem satisfactory. I don’t want to put a hole in the wall, and the tapes I’ve tried either aren’t adhesive enough, or are too strong and rip the paint off when you remove them, and then you get in trouble with the owner of the wall who is your landlord, and you become homeless and your life is ruined. It just doesn’t seem worth all of that just to stick something on a wall.

So when I found a Facebook ad (or did it find me…?) for this amazing substance that sticks things to walls, even bricks, but leaves no marks and is reusable, and is clearly miraculous, I didn’t hesitate to click that ‘buy’ button. I waited eagerly for my squishy clean and clear looking magical problem solving substance to arrive.

And waited.

I think it was coming by sea from China. It took a really long time. After a few weeks, I forgot about it, so that when it finally did arrive I needed a moment to figure out why I was getting this squishy stuff in the mail.

But when I unpacked it, it looked great, though it did smell a bit like toxic waste. Not an organic smell like a dead rat — it was more of a deadly chemical poison kind of smell. Anyway, I used it to stick my very light, small whiteboard to the wall so that I could write important words on it that I might need to remember. Such as ‘do not buy weird toxic substances from strangers.’

So there was my little white-board, happily sitting on the wall, smiling at me. It seemed pleased with this elevation in its station, up there where it could see the view and where people could appreciate its amazing ability to be written on, and make my life more productive and fulfilling.

Until it fell down.

I tried sticking it up again, but soon it fell down again, and this time it bruised itself slightly. My white-board was sad and so was I.

I frowned at the culprit and considered the popular startup acronym: MVP, meaning Minimum Viable Product. In this case, the product design team had indeed mastered ‘minimum’. The squishy stuff was no larger or heavier than necessary, and it was certainly not more useful than the advertisement claimed. As for the ‘product’ part, this is a very broad term. It might be difficult to argue in a court of law that it was not technically some kind of ‘product’. It was in the ‘viable’ department that there appeared to be something lacking. I have no wish to offend anyone, but it seems to me that to describe as ‘viable’ a product that is supposed to stick something to a wall for a large number of days, weeks, and why, even years yet is incapable of performing this service even for 24 hours, is a stretch.

To give my smelly, non-viable squishy stuff credit, my super light white-board, which was approximately one fiftieth the weight of the brick in the demonstration video in the advertisement, actually did experience a brief period of happiness. (only now does it occur to me that the brick was made of styrofoam. See what an easy mark I am?). My whiteboard stayed up on the wall for almost one full day. So technically, my squishy stuff was not entirely useless. If I’d simply been obliging enough to die that very night, I would have been a completely satisfied customer. I would never have had cause to complain.

But as you can see, I did not die.

So the next time the ad for the useless non-sticky squishy stuff appeared in my Facebook feed I took revenge and wrote a scathing review. As a result, the ad started appearing more frequently. The delusional algorithm was apparently designed by the same deranged person who invented the cursed non-viable ‘product’ in the first place. It thought that my act of commenting on the ad meant that I liked their pernicious substance, rather than realizing that I now yearned to throw it off a viaduct into a valley full of pointed rocks.

A normal person might dwell upon this shabby deception but I prefer to look on the bright side. If the squishy stuff had actually worked, I would have continued using it, and perhaps long term exposure to the toxic fumes it emitted would have given me cancer. So it is possible that the manufacturers actually saved my life.

Anyway, not being able to stick my cute little notice board to the wall seems like a small price to pay for continuing to trust everyone’s word after growing up in one of the most beautiful and safe countries in the world. I am content to remain an innocent, foolish yet happy New Zealander. After all, I’ve survived so far.

Oh, look! There’s this amazing new medicine on Facebook that promises to cure wooden legs! That’s incredible! I really need that. I’m going to order some now. Would you like me to send you the link?