things that sorta kinda work sometimes

my home is full of them

This vacuum, has a feature that makes it "easy" to detach and reattach the______, (whatever the heck that main big part is called on the end, you know that part you run across the rug to suck stuff up with), but that feature broke many many years ago, so that sweeping part just falls off midsweep, which drives me nuts!!! Now it has its good days and bad days, some days it holds itself together nicely, others it falls off every other minute. Which I feel to be testing me, a bit too much, as I am not inclined to like cleaning in the first place, I feel there really shouldn't be any extra hurdles to endure.

The microwave only goes on when it feels like it. It works for weeks at a time, then decides it has had enough of this, that no one appreciates it, and decides to quit. Cheese, rather like Fonzi has found out how to make it work. I have studied his technique, and am proud to say that I too now can often hit it at just the right angle and intensity to cajole it into re-heating my food.

The washing machine, this started about 3 weeks after we bought it, sometimes it just gets stuck in a cycle and runs on and on forever. You just have to restart it, but the trick is noticing this has happened before we all run out of water.

The garage door opener. Always works when I am leaving (well now it does, it didn't used to, it used to refuse to shut the door behind us, and I would run out of my car, through the garage, activate it in the garage run through the house and out the front door, and we would often be late), but now it always lets us shut the door as we leave, it does not however let us back in later. I push the button, and push the button, begging "come on, come on, let me in". Sometimes Cheese insists he can do it, and I give him a go. It always does let us in, eventually.

We did have to disconnect my gas thingy (on car), because for the past year, when I would go to the pump, sometimes it would open so I could put gas in my car, and sometimes it just refused. (you can see how this might end badly, with me stranded somewhere), usually if I would just drive about the gas station a bit, it would then agree to pop open, but sometimes I had to drive away with no gas.

Also on my car, the gear shift. It is an automatic, but for the past year it doesn't always do what the little letter in lights says. I put it in reverse, it goes forward. Often it just does nothing when this happens not moving at all, which is much better than when it does the opposite of what it is supposed to. This does have some potential to be dangerous, but one usually backs out slowly, so..

The TV in the bedroom, goes off whenever it wants. From April till the end of August it went off every 4 minutes, for a minute. Very annoying, of course didn't watch it, no point. Then in September it decided it had enough of a vacation and now works again most days.

My computer doesn't always properly go off when I turn it off, and then it wont go on later when I try and turn it on.

Our phones, ugh, they drive me crazy. They usually ring when people call, but not always (they hit rough patches when they decide not to). They frequently show us who it is on the caller id, but not always. And often, the downstairs phone will just refuse to pick up. You push the button, you say hello, and it makes a little noise back at you, you do this over and over, till the answering machine goes off, while you are running around the house like a crazy person looking for the other phone, but the other phone is not in the bedroom upstairs, it is missing, I hear Bob on the answering machine saying "Heeelllloooo, heeellllloooo. Where are you? Why aren't you picking up the phone?" He almost always hangs up just as I have found a phone that picks up and say "hello!". Then I call him back all breathless from frantically running about the house "what? what do you want?", and he talks to me for a minute and half, usually some talk radio tidbit, and then says he has to go, get back to work. And I think to myself, either we have to get a new phone, or I have to assume I need not talk to anyone the phone doesn't want me to.

We have outlets that decide when they will and wont work, and lights like that too. Our environmentally friendly long life lightbulbs go out in waves every couple of months.

My scale, my scale mocks me. One day I looked down and read 240 pounds, No way! I looked again, oh..errr...does it say 124 pounds? Wait no...it says 24.0 pounds! Ha ha ha ha ha! It likes to tease me. Often it will give me a number I really want, say 106, a weight I am nowhere near weighing, and I for a second will have an irrational thrill, and then reality hits me, and I get off the scale and get back on it again, and boy do those numbers goes up, and I am like "ugh!" and the scale is like "psych!!!".

There are more, but you get the idea. Nothing completely stops working, because then it knows, it would be replaced. They are tricky like that, working just enough.

So I am wondering, are most appliances temperamental and a bit power crazy (or lazy), or does the universe just enjoy messing with me?