Crap on

Thanks Mark for turning me on to Woot… maybe.
 
I just got my second Bag of Crap today.  For those not in the Woot culture, the Bag of Crap (or BOC) is buying random products for a buck.  The great majority of people get stuff that lives up to the product name: crap.  Not literally, but crappy items.  Some people get good stuff.  So it’s a lottery and you get what you get and that’s that.
 
One of the fun aspects of the BOC is the mad rush to get it.  There’s usually less than 5000 of them and you have a constantly-growing audience waiting for this item to appear.  When it does, it’s like Cabbage Patch Doll Christmas.  A Black Friday of Internet proportions.  This product usually marks the end of another Woot culture phenom: the Woot-off.  I’ve always likened the Woot-off to a rock concert, where everyone gets all built up then the band plays their huge hit and the crowd goes wild, rushes the stage, and trashes everything.  Such is the Woot-off, with product after product building up the audience and finally the BOC comes on and the fans rush the servers, taking them down in seconds.
 
So the first BOC I did ok, with an RCA Lyra 20GB MP3 player.  Not that I’d ever use it, but it would be the ultimate embarrassment present for a teen relative:
 
Here’s that MP3 player you’ve been asking for.  It’s not an Apple, but RCA is a good brand; they’ve been around longer than Apple.  I hope you enjoy it.
 
To illustrate the magnitude of uncool it would be…
image
That’s the Lyra next to my Zune.
 
But back to the point, this recent BOC was crap.  One of the items was a broken RC car, returned to whatever dollar store it came from as defective.  But I showed them.  I opened that plastic crap up, glued the broken pieces back together and now I have a piece of crap RC car.  That’s the game.  Sometimes you win, sometimes you have to make do with what you get.

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