I remember once buying envelopes that were almost exactly the wrong size to fold a normal A4 letter into. I used to have a toilet that flushed water up from the bottom instead of down from the top. In fact, the list of things in Taiwan that can’t be relied on to do what you bought them for is almost endless, starting with half the pens in the country.
[quote=“Loretta”]My chair just broke. I’ve had it two weeks.
I remember once buying envelopes that were almost exactly the wrong size to fold a normal A4 letter into. I used to have a toilet that flushed water up from the bottom instead of down from the top. In fact, the list of things in Taiwan that can’t be relied on to do what you bought them for is almost endless, starting with half the pens in the country.
You shouldn’t have eaten all the pies. And those envelopes were probably designed for “Letter” size, rather than A4. Two very similar, but annoyingly not quite the same, paper sizes.
Yes, they probably were. But the store sold A4 paper, not that stupid non-standard American crap. And why should I have to go on special shopping trips in the hope of finding something that works as advertised? Why doesn’t everything just do what they sell it to you on the premise it will do?
I bought one of those electric cooking pot thingies a few weeks ago. The display model, and the one pictured on the box, had a thermostat thingy. The one I found in the box when I got it home had no markings whatsoever on the crappy sliding control thingy. And the inner pot thingy spins around if you try to stir anything, which you have to do to stop it burning to the pan because it’s hotter than you realised. Useless crap. How the fuck do these people put up with it?
‘Working For a Week and Then Fall Apart at the Seams or Break House’ would be a fitter description.
Doesn’t have quite the same ring though does it?
Totally crap quality that looks nice but doesn’t work.
How about the self stripping socket sets and bendable screwdrivers? Any tight nut or screw destroys them. Utter garbage. There should be laws against this sort of crap being foisted on the unsuspecting public.
My fridge broke. The landlord came first to break it a bit more and suggest why it was broken (the shelves too close together) I knew one guy would come to fix it and misdiagnose the problem in order to overcharge. The second guy would do it wrong and not fix it. The third guy came yesterday and replaced the fan and it works. I am fairly confident it will break again within a month.
By the way, the fridge mending scenario described above would happen exactly the same in Thailand. It’s not a cultural problem, I don’t think, it’s an economical model. Details not clear. I don’t really think about it. Why fixate on minor day to day struggles?
True but these sometimes laughable struggles tend to repeat and build on one another over time. Taiwan drives perfectionists to the point of insanity.
We’ve lost countless appliances and devices over the years. Things that you only want to buy once. We add it to the cost of living here and basically double the price of any cheap appliance we may buy as we know that it will fail within a short period of time.
I had a harddrive, ‘made in China’; it broke within a couple of hours, lost a lot of data.
I have a phone, ‘made in Taiwan’. After half a year, the display only works half, and there is a loud buzzing when placing back the receiver (brand ‘Koka’). Had it with several Taiwanese products. They don’t want to bother with properly testing a product or taking back a failing product.
I stopped buying from Working House too, after several things I bought there don’t work, fall apart, or oxydize.
Don’t put much value on things ‘Made in Taiwan’ (no matter how proud they are about it). I know Taiwanese people’s and companies’ thinking too much and don’t trust that.
Just don’t buy the cheapest crap, avoid certain brands, and you’re safe. Besides what I’ve mentioned all my other appliances kept functioning until now.