I'm sure most, if not all of you reading this know what woot.com is. Well, in addition to the normal "Deal of the Day" stuff they offer, they occasionally do something called a "Woot-Off." During a Woot-Off, items appear on the site for a short time (sometimes a few hours; sometimes a few minutes) for extremely low prices. Wooters in the know watch the Woot-Off obsessively looking for a great deal on cool gadgets. For example, this past Woot-Off saw a refurbed Creative media player sell for about $100 that usually sells for $400+.
But the gadgets aren't the biggest prize of all. Nay, the biggest prize is crap. Random crap. A Bag of Crap. When you purchase crap, you decide how many craps you want in your order up to a maximum of 3. Each crap costs a dollar, and it costs $5.00 flat to ship crap to you wherever you are. So the natural choice is to get all three craps in your box. So $8.00 +tax if you live in Texas, and you have an order of crap winging its way to you via Smart Post. Wait, did I say winging its way? More like limping. Crawling even. As in it takes 12 days for this crap to finally arrive. That's not too healthy if you ask me. And that's if you were lucky enough to get crap at all. This past Woot-Off, crap was on sale for mere minutes, and 4500 craps were bought by the Wooting masses. According to the site, crap was selling at a rate of $243,378.45 worth of crap per hour. That's a lot of crap if you believe those numbers.
Now you may be asking yourself why crap is such a hot commodity. Let me share from some other, luckier Wooters who post their crap on the internet.
3 GE Insta-Jacks
2 Sansa 2gig mp3/FM players
I Earbud set
1 Usb Adapter for the Sansa's
1 ATI x600se PCI-E Video Card
1 MiracleBeam Clip-Lite
1 Awesome Red Backpack
1 Extra set of foamies for the earbuds
One red backpack
Three instajacks
One Darth Vader Dashboard Driver (press a button to make him talk)
One miniature r/c helicopter
1 Backpack
1 CS Bracelet
3 Instajacks
1 SanDisk 2 gb c250 (missing Battery)
1 SanDisk 2 gb e250 (no cable)
1 SanDIsk 8 gb e280 (no cable)
1 - Boston Acoustics Center Channel
1 - Reebok Heart Rate Monitor
3 - InstaJack Extensions
1 - WOOT! Beer Bucket #659 (ideal for July 4th!)
As you can see, there is some interesting crap in there. In the past, craps have included fully working Roombas (those robotic vacuums), refurbed ipods, computer components, etc. Even with some oddities such as missing cables, much of that crap is useful.
So the weekend of June 20th, I had absolutely nothing to do. My wife was out of town. Nothing to watch on the TV. Nobody around for entertainment, so I joined to obsessive quest for crap during a Woot-Off. Around 5pm, crap appeared, and with trembling hands I clicked a few times and ordered my first Woot crap (3 craps in case you are wondering). My crap arrived today. I could barely contain myself as I brought the box inside and tore into it. Now, for your viewing pleasure, I am going to show you my crap.
Woot.com Bag of Crap postBox looks good. Nice size. Rather light however. Big fluffy craps?
Woot.com Bag of Crap postAlright, here we have some of those inflatable air pads. Looks like I might have some crap in there worth protecting. Breakable crap. You can see a vtech box. They make decent cordless phones, so that's promising.
Woot.com Bag of Crap postThis box is actually heavy for its size. I wonder what could be in it?
Woot.com Bag of Crap postAh, we have three "GE Instajack for Phones Extension Units."
For use with GE model TL26595 Instajack for Phones system. Apparently you plug these craps into wall outlets and it allows you to add a phone jack anywhere. These are only extensions, however, are are useless without the main base unit. I don't have a need for extra phone lines anywhere anyway. Well, I guess that's three craps for the price of one.
Woot.com Bag of Crap postHere we have a backpack. The material seems kinda flimsy, but it could do in a pinch to carry crap. Except none of the zippers work. That's right, they are all broken. The main zipper separated and won't mesh back together at all. The zipper on the front pocket won't slide at all. Useless crap again.
Woot.com Bag of Crap postA long black box... could it be a pen and pencil set? What kind of crap could fit in there?
Woot.com Bag of Crap postNo, it's a "diamond" tennis bracelet. The metal smells horrible and made my hands stink from touching it (well, it is crap after all). I don't even want to think of what kind of reaction it would cause on someone's arm. I closed the clasp, and it got stuck. Trying to open it broke the whole crap.
Woot.com Bag of Crap postFinally we get to the vtech phone. Here we have a 5.8ghz cordless phone system with two handsets, a digital answering system in the main base, and an extra base to keep the second handset charged. It's a refurb, and the box is rather beat up.
Woot.com Bag of Crap postInside, we find all the parts. They look alright, though one of the phone handsets is scratched up pretty bad. At this point, I was actually rather pleased with this crap, as our cordless interferes with our wireless network in the house.
Woot.com Bag of Crap postUnfortunately, after plugging everything in and trying it out, it looks like this is the extent of the working equipment in the box. The main base doesn't seem to want to charge anything and many of the scratched up phone's buttons don't work. Since the extra base doesn't actually plug into a phone line and provide service, the whole crap is a bust. I'll fiddle with it a bit more before calling it a loss.
Interestingly, the digital answering system on the base unit still works, and there were 3 messages on it. The first 2 were telemarketers, but the last was a breathy woman named Linda calling to speak with Gary. She seemed... excited about the prospect of the conversation and rather disappointed that he wasn't there to pick up the phone. The working handset had numbers in the caller ID, including one for a Linda. Fun could be had with that, I suppose.
In all, the crap lived up to its name. I can't say there was anything in there to make me say it was worth it. Of course, the next time a Woot-Off comes along... who knows... I might be there vying for more crap.
So there you have it. I've shown you my crap. Anybody have any crap of their own to share?
(Now all the pictures should work)
