My can opener broke last night when I was making dinner. It's not an electric can opener, because I'm not an asshole[1], it's just a regular hand turn can opener that you are likely familiar with. It's got the little turn-y bit and it's got the gear that turns the cut-y wheel-y bit and it's hinged to accommodate the edge of the can. I got the thing about ~5 years ago because my old can-opener was starting to struggle to puncture and successfully cut through metal cans. It still, basically, functioned but after a while having to "open" a can 2-3 times before the thing successfully opened was getting old so I bought a new one and put the old one in the back of the drawer, because I'm a hoarder and because I've been around the block a few times and I know that having a backup of a tool is never a bad idea even if the backup is less than ideal. Like I said, it basically still works so it would do in an emergency. And that emergency came in the form of my 5 year old can opener no longer functioning.

To paint this picture further, I should mention that my old can opener is ancient. I got it off of my parents, who had it for most of my childhood and *they* got it when some relative or other died so this thing was used when they got it and it was even more used by the time I got it. I'm old enough to have used a computer before the WWW-internet to give you a brief sketch of the timeframes we're dealing with here

So, the old multi-decade can opener worked well enough to finish dinner (chili). The 5 year old new can opener is kaput (the little spot for the "axle" in the plastic turn-y handle thing, that accommodates the detent in the metal bit, is stripped out so the thing can't turn the cut-y wheel-y bit). This is very infuriating to me because I naively still expect simply objects and tools to function on a similar level as previous objects and tools of similar make and operation. But of course we live in the days of Consumer Engineering and inflation and corner-cutting, penny-pinching miser's running the entire planet. So the new thing is garbage, literally.

I'm trying to figure out a fix to get a few more cans out of the thing, but I shouldn't have to do this. We are supposed to be living in a glorious and advanced civilization yet all of our consumer goods seem to be devolving into unusable heaps.

Every 5 years or so, some asshole beancounter MBs somewhere decides to shave off a bee's dick worth of plastic from the handle to save a quarter of a cent on every can opener sold. Nobody notices at first but 10-20 years later our can openers are breaking in a fraction of the time that the previous generation of can openers were breaking. This has the "unintended" consequence that we all have to buy more can openers more often which is obviously a good thing for Mr. Tight-Ass Beancounterman III because now revenue is higher.

5000 lashes with a rattan cane and soap for dessert