WTF-y products and fails

[Kilrah]

There must certainly be a thread about that already, but I couldn't find it...

Walked past this in a shop today. Bug zappers are pretty cool and actually useful where I'm now, but... who the hell thought putting a retractable mains plug at the end of a ~1m long lever was a smart thing to do?! 

[mswhin63]

Is there a warning label. To be connected to extension cables only!

Agreed, some engineers are just University drop-outs if that is the kind of rubbish to come through.

There must certainly be a thread about that already, but I couldn't find it...

Walked past this in a shop today. Bug zappers are pretty cool and actually useful where I'm now, but... who the hell thought putting a retractable mains plug at the end of a ~1m long lever was a smart thing to do?! 

[Ian.M]

Absolute idiocy.  Trading Standards would probably seize that in the UK, and if you carried it on the street with the pins out it might be regarded as an offensive weapon!

It should have had a IEC 60320 C8 or C14 connector in the end of the handle, or been designed to charge from USB.

[Blaffetuur]

Well if your house burns down because of this, you certainly don't have to worry about bugs 

[digsys]

.. Bug zappers are pretty cool and actually useful ...

I bought something very similar a couple months ago, mainly to pull apart. As a useful tool, it turns out to be pretty useless - you can't swing it near ANY
type of structure, for high risk of damage ... and slow swishing is pointless ... but apart from that, I wanted to check the output. I can confirm it totally fries -
flies, mosquitoes, bees, butterflies, small birds, flying squirrels, ducks, geese, bats, lamas, crocodiles, cheekens, pets and others !
It has a near lethal arc, with no sort of current limiting. Naturally, the first thing I did was put a boost transistor in the OP stage !! Now I can do larger animals as well !!

[Ian.M]

[grumpydoc]

Absolute idiocy.  Trading Standards would probably seize that in the UK, and if you carried it on the street with the pins out it might be regarded as an offensive weapon!

It should have had a IEC 60320 C8 or C14 connector in the end of the handle, or been designed to charge from USB.

+1 especially as it is also not a BS1363 compliant plug - shrouded earth.

It just looks very....... odd.