this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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I don't mean what you use to chop down your feces, but an object that you realized only your family has and people would raise their eyebrows at. Best if said object has a sole purpose.

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[–] [email protected] 115 points 1 year ago (5 children)

We've got a frog tong. Every time a frog gets in the house catch it with a tong and toss it in the garden.

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[–] [email protected] 91 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Bucket in the shower to collect run-off water for flushing? Thought it was standard until I learned people don't even bother turning the faucet off when brushing their teeth.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (19 children)

What I love so much about the whole β€œturning the water off when you brush your teeth” debate is how everyone is basically telling on themselves.

The ADA recommends brushing your teeth for two minutes. Do you think anybody sits there and lets the water wash down the drain for two whole minutes? Or more likely does everyone have terrible dental hygiene?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

I lived with people who would have full political debates with a tooth brush in their mouth and the tap on.

Why does it matter how much I use? Agriculture uses 20 times more than I do!

Said after a tossing half their food away...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Bro unfortunately I do belive people would be careless enough to do that.

Had roommates that when they did dishes would keep the water running instead of filling up the sink. Didn't matter if it was even a few days worth of dishes.

I even mentioned to them about it, they said they just didn't want to put their hands in a sink full of dirty dish water.

People really do be that senseless.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (5 children)

That is mad. I am super conservative with the water i use but this all goes to a treatment plant

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[–] [email protected] 87 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Well, if it counts, we have a homemade potato grating machine from the Soviet times my grandfather has made because he was a genius and partly because of Soviet Union. It draws a lot of energy, emits a lot of noise (seriously). To turn on, it has two buttons, one for capacitor or something, another for the motor itself and, nowadays, I have no clue which one I should turn on first, left or right... It stands on three legs and weighs around 10 kg (old transformers were heavy). It produces good results, though, despite looking odd.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nornally first the capacitor and then the motor. The capacitor is there to absorb the power surge when the motor starts up.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Video please, internet stanger?

[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

Here you go, internet stranger: https://spectra.video/w/dre1z1tfm3KDupVCfi8MhS

No beer to power it up. It's 8:49 PM in Lithuania and my neighbours will be mad.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Note: the capacitor says:

ΠœΠ‘Π“Πž Β¬2
20ΠΌΠΊΡ„ Β±10%
500Π² 1077
ОВК

Which means 20 micro-pharads capacity, rated for 500 volts.

EDIT: no markings on the motor.

EDIT2: apparently, these capacitors are still being sold.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Reminds me of the joke I heard from the TV series Chernobyl. From memory:

Q: What weighs 2 tons, emits lots of smoke and noise and cuts apples into 3 pieces?

A: A Soviet machine designed to cut apples into 4 pieces.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Oh my god I love it

[–] [email protected] 74 points 1 year ago (2 children)

We have a pvc pipe cutter that is used to cut up frozen small animals, like quail and mice, for our raptors. It works really, really well.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago

Now this is what i'm talking about lol

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

The Rodent Reductors - for Raptors!

[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 year ago (3 children)

My parents' old place had the bat towels and the bat box.

Bats would hang out in our garden eating bugs and such. But they'd sometimes get confused, flop into the house, and get stuck. We live in a third world country, there isn't some organization we can call to properly care for the bats, but we're not stupid and we know that handling a wild animal is bad for us and the critter.

So. Old beat up towels. Toss one on the floor next to the crawling bat. It'll cling to it. Lift the towel from a distance. Gently drop it in the box. Put the box next to a tree. Bat will find the tree and find its way home.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

I like this. Beats a poop knife any day.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago (3 children)

My family has rules and positions we vote on. We're all adults out of the parents' house. We collaborate on a lot of projects and travel together in different combinations; the rules, or guidelines really, make us more efficient.

I am often travel coordinator for joint trips. Someone else handles food coordination specifically. The youngest calls meetings, usually on a quarterly to yearly cadence, and publishes the meeting notes to a shared cloud drive. Another is in charge of coordinating a Christmas gift exchange. We've rotated being financial and medical backup/adviser to the parents and those roles also comes with responsibility to update the other siblings on major changes.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there a political drama on your family, would love to watch it

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

One brother doesn't share or give up decision making well. The roles are intended to be project manager rather than dictator; the person is still expected to solicit opinions and delegate tasks to others. He gets frustrated really quickly when he doesn't get his way entirely and will get to a point where he doesn't hear other people's perfectly reasonable views.

But it's been this way forever, it's his personality. He knows it. A few of us are pretty good at calling attention to his behavior in a way that he doesn't feel attacked by and he'll chill out. One just goes toe to toe more aggressively with him and that tactic works sometimes too.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

How much shit does your family go through that you need bylaws and a treasurer?

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The toaster bottle opener.

A metal combination bottle opener/can tapper which is kept by the toaster oven and used to pull the hot rack out to get your food.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I'm so confused by the poop knife. What in the hell is a poop knife?! WHY?!

My family is NORMAL and we have NORMAL things in the house!!! WHAT THE FUCK IS A POOP KNIFE OR THE FUCKING FROG TONGS YOU PEOPLE ARE INSANE

[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago (3 children)

In case you are unaware, "poop knife" was a reddit r/confession post from a few years back that went viral, where someone admitted their family has a knife kept in the house specifically for when big 'movements' wouldn't flush, and he had just discovered that wasn't a normal thing everyone just has at home when he needed flush assistance at a friends house.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (4 children)

You ever drive down a rural road, and out the window you suddenly come across an old shuttered up house? The kind of house with five cars parked on the front lawn in various states of disrepair? With overgrown bushes pushing into the peeling paint of the wooden siding alongside a giant novelty bigfoot that seems to stare at you as you zip by down the road? The one with the chain link fence that's torn in five places and yellowed trailer up on blocks? The one with a dog tied to a post, barking it's head off outside, so you know someone actually lives there?

I imagine these threads are like a window into the lives of the people in those houses. It's like they're living in a whole different society, with their weird quirks and vaguely unsettling rituals.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

We have a fork specifically for cat food. It’s different from all our other forks (we bought it separately) and it’s used exclusively for β€˜mashing’ and dividing wet cat food.

We love our cats and we love to give them the food they like but wet cat food is disgusting and we’d rather not risk cross contamination.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

We got an egg folk, bowl and sponge. Mum hated things that touched eggs to touch anything else.

I'm learning that my household had a shit tonne of weird things

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (6 children)

No where near the poop knife, but people are weirded out that I use a power drill for dishes. I don't have a washer and the drill dose things a rag could never conceive of.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

They use a special bit for dishes. The dish bit destroys the dishes so you never have to clean them again!

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Wife and I have since established the crotch blanket (tm). It's really just a flat sheet, but we each have our own and take them even when we travel. Keeps your legs and bits from sticking in the heat, and crumpled correctly it supports your knees while you sleep.

Not that weird as an idea, but wish we would have settled one something better than "crotch blanket".

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

A pillow should be used here as I do

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

At my parents' house, the shower bucket. At my house, the kitchen jug.

The water heater is at the other end of their house from the bathroom. My water heater is in the middle of the house, the kitchen is on the end. It takes awhile for hot water to reach their shower/my kitchen sink and dishwasher. So, in order to not just waste that clean if cold water by running it down the drain, we catch it and use it for something. I use it to water my vegetable garden.

Basically I fill my watering can from the cold water that comes out of the hot tap before I start my dishwasher.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

We have a pair of tongs for fishing out stones that our youngest son (2) throws down an outside drain.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (11 children)

The frog tongs reminded me of my spider box. Because I think spiders are good and reduce insect population I don't kill them. Instead I have a shoebox with a piece of paper in it. Get spider on paper, they usually crawl right onto it if you hold it near them. Then throw paper into shoebox and close the box. Shoebox should seal and not have holes, btw. Most shoeboxes do not seal. Then take the box outside and open. +1 spider population in your yard.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I was going to say that having some method of relocating spiders outside is pretty common (whether it's a shoebox, Tupperware container, etc), but maybe I just think that because I'm Australian and we often see spiders inside in Australia lol

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (5 children)

back then, we all thought they were our normal breakfast spoons until we accidentally found photos of our roommates abusing them as sex toys

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

First i'm hearing of spoons that are specific to breakfast

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

my youngest brother had a lazy stick. It was a broom handle and a ruler taped together with a couple of chop sticks mixed in to help hold the two together. To avoid getting out of bed, he fashioned this up to turn off the lights in his room. Inspired by Homers broom in the episode of the Simpsons where he gains a ton of weight to go on disability.

This stick did the trick and even could turn the tv on and off.

Twenty years later, my brother is currently on a diet and losing a lot of weight. All the weight is post stick and much later in life, but we have a laugh about it every now and again.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (8 children)

We have a suite of kitchen tools because sometimes walking downstairs to the garage is to far when all you want to do is measure something real quick or quickly tighten or loosen a screw.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My grandfather used to run a fauna park with kookaburras. We had a meat grinder, like what’s used to make filling for pies and pasties, which was used to grind up baby chickens and mice into a paste for the kookaburras.

They also had a meat grind to use for pies and pasties so I hope they never mixed the two.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I have an internet pencil.

Getting reliable internet through the house while renting crappy houses means I end up using ethernet over power bricks.

Every couple of months they will fail and need to be power cycled but the switches on the power point are occluded by the EoP brick without enough room for my fat fingers.

I would just grab any pen or pencil to use as my switch flicking tool but they are constantly purloined by my children so I keep a special internet pencil on my desk.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Drywall patching spade that is a stain scraper.

Many years ago, I lived with two slobs. They often left dried food on the counters, floors, and other flat surfaces (like the stove top or floor of the oven). In addition, one of them fed their dog with human food that gave it the shits, and was not attentive towards talking the dog out to poop. So the floor would have clay-like puddles of drying dog diarrhea. This scraper was used to deal with the dollop of whatever organic matter was dried onto the counter, floor, or otherwise. Then washed in the next dishwasher cycle.

"But you'll scratch the [surface material]!!!"

I don't care. My house, my problem. Clean up after yourself, for fucks sake. Plus, I was always wiping down the counter with cleansers, so any cross contamination was not a concern. I am a voracious cleaner.

Those slobs have left, the dog passed away, and the dogs my wife and I have now are mostly housebroken and don't have diarrhea. The scraper only rarely gets used these days. When she moved it, I had to explain to her what it was, though.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Congratulations on losing the housemates, they're gross

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I have a fetch ladle and a coal spoon. My dog lives for fetch but always sets the ball next to my feet. If I'm sitting on the back porch I don't want to keep bending forward so I have a ladle that's perfect for scooping up a tennis ball and throwing it. I also have a slotted spoon that I use to grab unburnt coal out of my grill before dumping the ashes. Both of these utensils just hang from my grill.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

A mop in the hallway because my dumb but lovable doggo can't take a sip without spilling most of the water onto the floor

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