It's enough to drive a young girl mad

[venta]

This morning, I was made inexplicably happy by my bottle of Boots' facewash. It ran out.

Boots Tea-tree and Witch-hazel foaming face-wash comes in a pump-action plastic bottle. The liquid is green, but comes out as white foam - this in itself delights me, like getting yellow custard from pink custard powder. The pump works very effectively, even if the label does have the most spuriously accurate instructions ever, ordering you to dispense "two amounts" onto your hand.

Anyway, it has for some time neatly dispensed white foam for me, and this morning it ran out and stopped. Last night it worked perfectly. There has been no intermediate stage where the pump sputtered and spluttered, or ceased working with some left in the bottom of the bottle. I didn't have to attack the bottle with scissors to get the last out... it Just Worked. And, because the bottle is clear plastic, I could see that the end was nigh and get new stocks in.

Truly, our technological advancement is at a strange level when we can send probes to Mars and yet I'm surprised that a pump-action bottle works properly. But it did, and that made me happy. Oh, and it's even quite good for washing your fizzog with.

For the record, Superdrug do one in an identical-looking bottle, except they've also included mint at concentration levels which make your eyeballs peel.

Comments

we can send probes to Mars

[ewx.livejournal.com]

...sometimes they even survive the trip...

[thefon.livejournal.com]

I'm with you there, it's a joy when simple things work as they should.
"as it says on the tin"
Even better when more complex things "just work" intuitively.

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

Venta is not only someone who uses the word fizzog, but who is prepared to commit it to print...well, electrons.

Well done!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Is that worthy of congratulation !?

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. Show me anyone else who has used the word in their LJ in the last year. No Googling allowed, of course.

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

I had to work out what you meant from the context. Fizzog is Aussie vernacular for something of a damp squib.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Things working is great, but it's a source of endless puzzlement to me that we manage to un-invent formerly working things. My list so far:

* Clothes pegs.
* Cookers.

Yes, you can still buy old-style (working!) versions of both of these... but only if you know where to find them!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Really ? In what way to modern cookers/clothes pegs not work ?

I've never bought a cooker, and have judiciously ignored anything plastic that didn't look like a proper clothes peg to me.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Our new cooker has plenty of stupid features, but my "favourite" is that Zanussi appear to have forgotten how to use a button to make electrical sparks for the purpose of igniting gas burners. My parents' cooker (and every other appliance I've used since) had no problem with this thirty years ago! Now every time we ignite the grill the room ends up smellling slightly of gas and occasionally we're treated to a miniature fireball.

As for clothes pegs, the wooden sort with metal springs in are great not only for pegging clothes to washing lines, but also for holding the tops of bags closed and any number of other things (including making excellent toy catapults). This hasn't stopped retailers across the last 20 years repeatedly offering plastic things for sale which are more specialised, less effective for their particular task than a clothes peg and (to add insult to injury) more expensive.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I got perfectly good ordinary clothes pegs from Tesco not long ago. My old housemate then left them all out in the rain to go mouldy.

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

I prefer plastic pegs to wooden ones - the rounded edges are gentler on my clothes. They do need to be the ones with metal springs though, rather than those weird triple pronged monstrosities.

[venta.livejournal.com]

By the way, you get extra points if you can spot today's lyric-subject and explain why I chose it :)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Well obviously I know the tune! Why you chose it... well I didn't spot this, but now that you mention it the album title pretty much has to be the reason. And IIRC it's the first track on the album, which could be deliberate. :-)

Gosh, you should be writing cryptic crosswords or something!

(PS. I also spotted your Debbie Harry lyric the other day, which I think might be the first one I've got that wasn't 80s heavy rock!)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm terrible at cryptic crosswords!

There is usually (but not quite always) a reason for the subject line I choose. The reasons are sometimes a bit opaque, so it's really more a game that I play with myself :)

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Usefully, those pump action things work splendidly when refilled, too. We had one of Kandoo handwash (belonging to the six year old) which now contains Tesco cheapo refill soap and still foams exactly the same way. Hoorah. (I wouldn't have been at all surprised to find it was somehow rigged so that it could not be refilled or broke when you tried or just spat out glop rather than nice white foam.)

[pm215]

Top tip -- describing things as 'inexplicable' works better when you don't follow up with a detailed and comprehensible explanation :-)

[thegreenman.livejournal.com]

We use a bar of soap here.

No plastic bottle, pump or otherwise, is required to use a bar of soap.

[zandev.livejournal.com]

Though you can add technology to a bar of soap too. My parents' house has had for years magnetic soap holders (you push a little metal plate into the bar). I've always thought this is a useful improvement - the soap bar doesn't sit in a puddle.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Witchcraft!

facewash

[exspelunca.livejournal.com]

Plastic tubes are the pits. I slit the side and end of a tube of Boots foundation and filled a 15ml pot with what wouldn't squeeze out. It's like Colmans getting rich on the mustard we leave on the side of the plate.