These things and kitchen sink blenders are the two most mysterious things for an European child watching US-Shows.
I at least understand the water fountains and experienced them a few times here and there but the sink blender waiting to chop your fingers is a total mystery.
Garbage disposal? They have limited utility, but save you from having to transfer food scraps from the sink to the trash or compost.
The built in ice/water dispenser in the refrigerator is the one that mystifies me.
Garbage disposals are a thing I can’t understand for the life of me. Like yes the food scraps are disgusting but you pull out the metal filter not scrape the food from the sink. And it isn’t free correct me of I am wrong but it costs about 50 dollars.
My first UK flat - renovated in the 1980s - had a waste disposal installed. Eventually it clogged, and the plumber who came to fix it said he loved these things because they made him a lot of money. He himself would never have one. It had clogged from the dirt from potato peelings, apparently a very common issue.
Water fountains are a U.S. thing? Never knew that. Is just filling bottles at sinks more common in other countries? Do people not drink on the go as much?
There are some fountains like this in Airports and where the tapwater is pretty bad, but usually a public water fountain is an old fountain from the medieval times with some ornaments and stuff
This is the one from my home city
But they are only outside because on the inside you just fill your bottle in the bathroom
Unchilled Tab-Water and filling bottles in the bathroom. Some drinking fountains are publicly available but more of a novelty and none usually not inside of buildings.
I don’t know about others, but getting hydrated isn’t an issue here. It’s rarely significant above 30°C even in summer (and if max 2 months) and our water in my city is of such “high quality” they bottle and sell it. (Aqua di Monaco).
I’ll never forget the day in elementary school where I saw a kid casually put his mouth directly on the spout. Then it dawned on me: “There are probably others like him.”
Sounds like you were lucky then, because I remember elementary school too and probably every 5th kid did this on the regular. And have you ever dealt with the really young kids <6 years old? They’ll ask for a boost, suck that spout like a teat, and let everything that they don’t swallow run down their neck soaking their shirt, but they’ll be hydrated.
Honestly — how is this not just simple stealth product placement?
I assume this meme was originally made by some hydro homie with a special interest, since it’s not the type of product marketed to individuals.
Totally agree. But separated from the hydrohomies group, some operations vp is looking at that thinking… “hmm… it’s time. I’ll call my guy.”
I mean the meme is kind of perfect for capitalism?
Imagine some VP spending more than 5min here before realizing how unwelcome they are, let alone making purchasing decisions off this.
I doubt the CEO cares about memes to market their water fountains. Especially on Lemmy, there’s ~40k ppl here and most would rather drink CEO blood over buying a water fountain.
I doubt people will buy a water fountain just because some people online think it’s funny, especially when 99% of their profits are for new buildings lol
These are institutional devices. Place where I work has the good work one and I like that but it’s still a product even if I’m not personally going to buy it.
Are you so deeply against “capitalism” that you’re against products as such?
We had something like the first one when I was in high school. When I was a freshmen, I saw another student drop his pants, hop up on top of it, lower into the spout so it went ALL the way up his ass, reached around and turned the water on for a second, then lifted off and shot a wave of shit-water all over the basin/wall behind it, then hopped down and ran off giggling.
Yeah…
Haven’t used a water fountain since.
How do I unlearn to read?
Edit: Solved!
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I also don’t, simply because my high school had a string of vandalism where some kid was pulling all of the water fountains out of the walls. Like he was just ripping them straight out. There’s no way they could support someone putting their entire body weight on it to shove the spout up their ass.
Your school’s infrastructure was apparently even shittier than mine. In any case, he was a skinny little high schooler - that thing could have been screwed into drywall and still supported his weight.
…and if you don’t think a water fountain spout could fit up someone’s ass, I’ve got some foreign object removal stories from working in the OR that… well, you probably also wouldn’t believe, but you’d be amazed what an anal sphincter can accommodate.
Not even remotely the same but in the 90’s mcdonalds still had salt and pepper shakers on the tables. I knew a guy who loved throwing them in the bag when he got up from the table along with the ten straws he grabbed and wad of napkins. He really was under some serious financial stress in no way due to anything he had done. I refused to use the salt and pepper shakers at his house and he kept bugging me as to why. I told him he didn’t want to know but he insisted. Finally I told him about the time I saw some kids going from table to table licking the tops of the shakers. He immediately threw them all away. Later they started to reappear and it was because he figured out at the first of the month they replaced them and the new one usually had the seal left on them.
Before you trash the guy for doing that. The guy made 80 grand one year and could barely afford food. All that money went to paying his wife’s medical bills. She had grown up inside the boundary of a superfund site out in new mexico and had all kinds of tumors and other problems. It was called a pre existing condition and his insurance wouldn’t pay for hardly anything. They finally divorced so she could get SSI. That was in the early 2000’s. This country sucked then and it still sucks.
Yeah no judgement for being frugal at McD’s expense. 1) Fuck McD’s, and 2) Do what to gotta do. There was a point in my life where I got meals from the condiment station at a college cafeteria. They had free ketchup, and a hot water dispenser thing for making tea, so I’d make ‘tomato soup’ by making myself a bowl of hot ketchup water. Couple handfuls of a single package saltines, and there’s lunch. Life sucks when you can’t afford anything, but it does make you become pretty creative when it comes to saving money.
The concept of cleaning things also saves a ton of money compared to throwing things away.
Why did he need more than 1 or 2 pairs of salt and pepper shakers though? Why did Mcdonalds need to replace them every month instead of refilling them?
iirc, they were those plastic shakers that didn’t actually have a way to get into them - nothing to unscrew to refill it. They were designed to be used until empty, then discarded and replaced.
