Mathom city
I was just at Best Buy looking for something that I actually needed, (a movie, a game, something important like that) and I stopped to look past the glitter and glitz of the packaging; really looked at what they're selling.
Most of it is garbage.
There's huge categories of things that don't work, that nobody needs and that once bought, will sit around your house forever until you die and some other idiot buys it an estate sale and then it sits around HIS house, the curse passed on from victim to victim like a monkey's paw until someone has the guts to stop and yell...enough.
CD cleaners-- garbage. Cheap-ass solitaire programs--garbage. Extended warranty plans for solid-state electronics--larcenous garbage. Might as well buy the Brooklyn Bridge. You'll do better standing in the middle, collecting tolls in a beat-up tin cup then you ever will trying to collect on an in-store service plan.
Nobody needs the little fluffy cell phone covers and the USB flashlights and the cutesy screensavers.
J.R.R. Tolkien came up with a great word that describes this dreck--mathom. To quote the good professor:
Anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort
I have rooms full of this stuff. Chochkis from trade shows, power plugs to nowhere, old disks and drives and gizmos and gadgets that don't even look pretty. I realize that these guys make their money from the extras. Hard Rock Cafes make more money from the shirts than they do from the (cough) food. It's not their fault that they sell, we're the ones dumb enough to buy. Consider that the next time you see a cute mousepad shaped like the Rock's eyebrow. Above all, never, never buy anything whose title contains the words "Collector's Edition."
Posted on November 07, 2005
