Honest, I'm Not a Thief...
Not me, but a friend of a friend, and the offending item was one of those steering wheel locks, as purchased from a scouser on a market.

It was used a couple of times on his vintage motor with no problems. A week later he heard the worrying 'snap' of the key in the lock, leaving the car immobilised in the supermarket car park with no easy way of getting home.

Fortunately, this being a cheap piece of automotive rubbish, the long metal bar (that normally stops you driving the car by hitting the windscreen) could easily be bent back with a few whacks from the hammer in his boot... problem solved.

Convincing the police office he met on the way home, that it *was* his car and he *wasn't* some scally car thief, was another matter entirely....
(mellotron never could get the hang of Thursdays, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 22:27, Reply)

Not me, I have expensive tastes,
but my brother brought a flyswatter from poundland. Not just any old flyswatter but an electric tennis racket of terror that I'm sure contravened many EC regulations. When you caught a fly it buzzed and smoked and, if you were really lucky, caught fire.

I always wanted to get a moth with it, just to see what would happen.
( SugarSpunSister Yeah, whatever, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 22:03, 10 replies)

Betterware
One word - don't. A hand-cranked shredder that shredded no more than one A4 sheet at a time (and which went blunt after about a month), and a guillotine which wasn't even big enough to crop 6x4 photos (and which broke after about a month).

Not even *cheap* tat. Just tat.
(ramrod_newell had his hair brushed at, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 22:02, Reply)

Lidl's finest Black Forest Ham
Looks like Parma ham, tastes like chavvy air freshener sprayed onto old fanny flaps.
(hnry just had a vowel movement, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 22:00, 4 replies)

7 party poppers on new years eve
At the last minute on new year's eve, I purchased seven "giant party poppers" from the pound shop.

These things aren't any party poppers. Imagine, if you will, a wallpaper tube with a co2 canister attached to the bottom. Inside, the manufacturers had inserted approximately half a metre of glitter, streamers and bits of shiny plastic.

A few beers later and these bastard devices were set off in every corner of my house, making the place look like a gay World War III scene. It took us 5 hours to scrub the dye from the streamers out of our floor.
(hcarp, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 21:33, 3 replies)

How many lawyers does it take to shingle a roof?
About 6 years ago, being tired of the IT profession, I went back for a law degree. No work for 3 years, higher salary potential, meet the potential Mrs. Bigvegan, all would be awesome!

Not considering I had no idea what being a lawyer was all about. I mean, would you go to welding school without realizing that you spend most of your time putting bits of metal together with lots of sparky smoky high-voltage? How I missed the fact that I was signing up for a life of soul-killing paperwork drudgery was beyond me.

Not considering that your grades follow you FOR LIFE, effectively making me (at the top of the bottom half) unemployable at the firms that pay enough to make the drudgery bearable.

Not considering that once you've got a law degree, it's almost IMPOSSIBLE to get a regular job again, as nobody wants to hire someone who can sue for free.

And most especially not considering that the future Mrs. Bigvegan has MOST DEFINITELY NOT attended law school. Three years of being trained to argue and twist logic into hitherto unrecognized forms is not what I'm looking for in a loving mate.

So that would make my law degree the single most useless piece of crap I've ever bought.

But cheap? Not hardly. I've got another 17 years of paying off loans.

Don't do it kids.

(For those of you paying attention to the subject line, the answer is "About three, but you have to slice them pretty thin.")

Pop!
(not here, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 20:54, 4 replies)

Another one from Homebase
A few years ago I decided to repaper my living room. I duly set off to the local DIY store (Homebase) to get some paste. Now, at the time Homebase only stocked their own brand for a lot of things so I couldn't get Solvite or Polycell paste, only their own. Well, I thought, at least it's cheap and wallpaper paste is wallpaper paste, right?

Wrong, as I soon found out. I am pretty crap at DIY at the best of times - whenever I try to do anything I am always reminded of Frank Spencer (the one on the telly, not the guy who writes funny stories here). This time all seemed to be OK - at least for about a week. Then the paper started coming off the wall. I soon realised it was way beyond a mere touch up job so had to get a fresh batch of paper and, this time, a decent paste from another DIY store. It was so easy to get the first lot of paper off that it came off in whole sheets without tearing at all.

Never again will I buy Homebase wallpaper paste.
(eesnahk, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 20:53, Reply)

Salami from the corner shop
I just did. I wish I hadn't.
( its_hatorah_bitch is b3ta the devil you know on, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 20:15, 2 replies)

Not cheap but definately tat.
If you find yourself at any point deciding that you want to take up the great (read lazy) sport of darts you will be wanting to find yourself some nice throwing arrows that are comfortable to throw. You may be tempted to go to one of the various high-street sports shops that sell darts and get some of the posh nickel/silver/gold plated darts that are endorsed by the likes of Phil Taylor and so on but I urge you not too. For a start they are normally about £25 for set and secondly what they say they weight on the pack will not be their actual weight, a guy I know who runs a proper darts shop got a couple of sets and weight them all up, they were supposed to be 27grams but none of the 3 from either set actually were. You can get cheaper and better quality darts from a proper dart shop, mine cost £15 and are great.

Length? Depends how big your hands are, don't want your darts too short to throw properly.
(OzEden is probably clinically insane, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 19:52, 1 reply)

Rubbish £99 computer
A friend posted a link to a highly dubious-sounding special offer from a well-known computer manufacturer. A £99 computer, reduced from £400-odd. Only had to pay VAT.

Well, I ordered one (free delivery!), it arrived within a week with no problems at all, and I unpacked it.

Dual-core, 1.8GHz E2160 processor, a gigabyte of ECC memory, two SATA hard disks, gigabit ethernet, a fantastically well-built tower case, a huge processor heat-sink that is a thing of beauty (low-speed fans FTW) - it's really quiet, is now running Debian and is now a handy dandy home server.

The catch?

Erm... not sure. I think I was supposed to add some dramatically overpriced extras to my order, like an operating system or whatever. I didn't. Never mind.

Cheers D***!
(Happy Idiot Talk now has an alibi for, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 19:11, 2 replies)

Cheapo light bulbs
We bought some cheapo light bulbs, guess how much - yes - £1. Using them seemed ok, until one shot out of the light onto the table and exploded. Then a few days later, one shot out of the lamp, up in the air and exploded. Cheap crap. Lots of fun when you are a kid though. I was about 10.
(goonbreath, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 18:35, 2 replies)

i bought my sister the best pound shop tat ever for christmas (yes i got her other stuff too)
a tiny plastic George Bush caricature sits a top a small battery powered tank and chases an equally tiny Bin laden about on a sort of scalextric track.

on the box it's labeled 'Super Fun Child's Thing' i kid you not.
( monstrinho do biscoito teeeshurts = www.nogunarmy.com, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 18:22, 2 replies)

Crap camcorder and a lot of shame
Bought a camcorder off the mad bloke who lives upstairs (when will I learn!) and never got much use out of it, primarily because it was a pile of shite.

Thought I'd try to flog it on ebay, so looked it up to see how much they're going for and found this...
reviews.ebay.co.uk/Fake-Camcorders-MX-7000-MX-7000-SONY-JVC-CANON_W0QQugidZ10000000001889778

How much did I pay? £75. Its sitting on the desk in front of me now mocking me with its crapness!
(Mogg Questioned her own sanity on, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 17:46, Reply)

Henry St.
Any Dubliners here will be familiar with Henry Street, the infamous home of '3 GILLETTE MACH 3 BLADES FOR 5 EURO!' knackers.

Walking down the street this christmas I saw a man selling the top 20 cds out of a box hurriedly for 5 euro a pop.

Walking back up the street I saw him being bundled into the back of a police car.

so not so much cheap tat as cheap, but stolen decent stuff.
(BobbyDarin Was somewhere Beyond the Sea on, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 17:30, Reply)

Headphones
£1.99 headphones from Argos. The loose connections in the wire and the chipped paint were annoying, but the icing on the cake was looking at them to find out which was the left one and which was the right, to find that they were both marked as left.
(and now for someone completely different, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 17:23, 1 reply)

I used to live
in the west end of london, and across the road from my place of domicile was a nightclub in a basement. It was all fully legit, and knowing as we did the promoter got in for free, which was rather nice.

What also struck us, once we got inside, was the very, very cheap vodka on offer - it was dirtily inexpensive, and for around 2 quid you got a double plus mixer in london, where a single shot is usually more than that. Good times were indeed had by all.

It's not that the cheap vodka was without fault - as soon as you hit fresh air your legs went to jelly and your memory turned off, and the next morning you felt as though someone had filled your head with barbed wire. Having drunk plenty of cheap voddie at uni without said problems, we had a running joke regarding the contents of said beverage.

A while later myself and my colleagues had moved away, but not too far, and frequently returned to our very old haunts. On one such occasion we ran into a guy we knew in the pub, a fellow patron of the cheap dirty club night, who had a big smile on his face.

He held out a leaflet.

"Read that!"

The diminutive missive revealed details of some counterfeit grog being sold in london. According to the article, it was being made in a shed somewhere out of industrial alcohol for imbibation by the unsuspecting cheapskate masses, such as myself.

Our friend pointed to the bottle in the illustration.

"Isn't that the vodka they sell at ******"

The brand name and label were scarily familiar. Unless I was very badly mistaken, which considering the side-effects of drinking said beverage, I was certain I wasn't, I'd been paying the people over the road a token sum for the privilege of....

"Drinking Meths?! We've been drinking meths?!"

Our friend nodded. Instead of cheap booze, we'd been caning our livers, and doing something you'd only ever normally do if you were a tramp or dared, and in the latter case they now owed us a fortune in dare spoils.

To re-enforce the message, the arrest of the guy who made it made the local news a few days later. Our haunt got a new brand of cheap, nasty spirit in, which we proceeded to drink in quantity.
(cs1ca, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 15:40, 1 reply)

Cheap tat from 'oop north'
I have some northern relatives, who excel in locating the crappiest items ever, as they only shop at Sunday markets or pound shops...

Cans of smell masquerading as deoderant

'Remote control' cars with short cables connecting the remote control, so in reality you have to follow three feet behind at all times

Action men dolls with two inch metal spikes under their heads

DIY kits where the screwdriver handles come away from the stem as soon as any pressure is applied, rendering them totally useless

Hand held LCD 'computer games' which take batteries only made in Russia

'Disposable' washing pegs which break after only one use

Razors that rust as soon as you open the packet

Bleach so weak you could drink it

Fake football shirts which shrink upward after one wash, turning them into crop tops

Generic toy cars which resemble no real car on earth (unlike Matchbox cars) and end up being used to throw at older kids drinking the other side of our garden fence

Fucking useless, the lot of it.
(Fatty Thornton, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 15:28, 1 reply)

The Computer of Doom
Back when I was younger (had just started secondary school) my mother bought a Compaq computer for £50.

For a while this computer was great but...

eventually it started running oddly, would overheat in about 5 minutes and would eventually just pack up all together.

We kept this computer for a while and rescued the hard drive from it, it's now a secondary hard drive in the computer we have. and does it's job well.

If you ever buy cheap crap that packs up, try and salvage something from it.
(Maccy Divided by 0 on, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 15:17, Reply)

Poundland pens
I generally like poundland, for things that aren't overly important it is grand. Plus batteries are good too!

But I got this pack of 40 pens at the beginning of the uni year. Been using them fine, as I don't really have to do too much writing.

Studying time came and I get down to some serious writing.

2 days pass and my fingers are aching so I change to some lovely bic pens. 2 weeks on I still have numbness at the top of one of my fingers caused by it!

Legnth? - Don't know, can't feel the tip!
(puggs, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 14:44, Reply)

I once bought some caps in a pound shop...
As soon as I took them home they bloody exploded.
(bad touch, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 14:41, Reply)

Car Boot
Went to a car boot sale last summer and spotted a stand selling cut price electrical goods.

I went over to see what was on offer, and the whole story unfolded with a tedious inevetability.......
(never-right -getting it wrong since '78, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 13:30, 4 replies)

SUPRISE!
A mate of mine would buy cheap porn dvds off of some weird chinese guy (you already know where this is going dont you). So we put teh dvd in, sit back and are faced with this beautiful womans face, the camera slowly pans down to something a woman reeeaaaly shouldnt have!!


Needless to say the dvd was swiftly taken out and snapped up before his girlfriend could find it
(kristofski6992, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 12:35, 1 reply)

My dutch bike
I spent part of my university years at the Universiteit Leiden, in Holland. Now Holland is even bigger on bikes than Oxford or Cambridge, and it immediately became obvious to me that I'd need a bike to get around, if only because all my mates there had one and I'd need to keep pace with them whilst out on the piss.

The only problem was, I didn't want to spend actual money on it. I'm not a tight-arse, this was a tactical decision: I'd rather spend the money on beer and women, than on a fucking bike.

Being a resourceful chap, I hit upon a solution. This was Holland - bike theft is more endemic in Leiden than the clap is amongst prostitutes in the red-light district. I didn't have the skill (fair enough - or the balls) to nick a bike myself, but the by-products of bike theft littered the streets - the odd wheel here, a rusty frame there, maybe a saddle or two. My block of flats also had a communal bike garage, where there were a few sorry-looking bike carcasses. So I decided to build my own bike from abandoned parts - a Frankenbike, if you will.

Over a period of a week or so, my bike took shape. The frame I'd found was painted in Rasta colours, and badly painted at that. The tyres were so bald that bits of inner tube actually poked and bulged through holes, like some rubber hernia. And - this was the bit that surprised me most - the front wheel was bigger than the back wheel. Turns out that there are two different commonly-used wheel sizes, and I didn't have the privilege of having more than two wheels to choose from, so a matching set was impossible.

The result was awesome to behold. The bike looked like some demented, broken-down, Rastafarian chopper. It was so shit, it was actually cool. Of course, it got punctures every second day, but I loved it. Even when I got a puncture taking a girl back from a bar to my love-nest, and she spent the entire journey berating me for my shit bike whilst she walked beside me, I still loved it. Mainly because she still put out regardless.

But karma was enforced. Despite my bike clearly being the shittest, most broken contraption within the Amsterdam-Leiden-Hague metropolitan area, it still got nicked from outside Leiden railway station. I never replaced it because I couldn't bear to ride any other bike.

And, of course, because I was still too tight to buy one, and I'd now used up all the available parts on the streets.

No apologies for length - you love it.
( Doomladen ms paint lover, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 12:05, 8 replies)

When I was at school
I had to attend a one-to-one lecture which consisted of us students having to evaluate our teachers. It was some meeting hosted by the Teacher Effectiveness Enhancement Programme.

Seriously, that's the last bit of TEEP Chat I'll ever attend.
(__, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 11:12, 1 reply)

Some cheap wine I found in a local shop in Newcastle


Tastes like it too.
(__, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 11:00, 6 replies)

My old Grannie used to say...
"Buy cheap, buy twice..." Good advice. These words always come to mind when I buy something shit which breaks after 5 minutes...

I have bought exactly 2 of every item I own...
(aroe_m0rre, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 2:23, Reply)

Anyone ever go to Tradex?
I went semi-frequently (mostly with parents and was fascinated by the bulk sweets for sale...) and once bought a swiss army knife type product. It cost me about a quid or two, I thought it was fantastic, slight problem: I tried to use the corkscrew to open a bottle of wine. Upon being twisted, the corkscrew proceeded to resist and completely straightened itself out, turning itself into a skewer instead. A skewer that also wouldn't fold back into the knife.
No idea why I was trying to open a bottle of wine when I was 8 or so...
(Robbish is twitching & salivating like with myxomatosis, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 1:15, 1 reply)

Comedy Condoms
Condoms decorated with faces,animals,fire,tree's etc...

99p

They don't work


Which they kindly point out on the back of the packet, at the bottom...

FUCKING SMALL PRINT !
( Mr Nerdy-Speccy-FuckNuts Ouchy ouchy wa wa!, Sun 6 Jan 2008, 0:43, 1 reply)