Slap Happy

I could slap myself for buying the “Slap Chop.” But I don’t blame myself, I blame Vince.

Vince is the extremely convincing host of the Slap Chop infomercial, a little slice of time stolen from your life where you subject yourself to the salesmanship of people like Vince. Vince demonstrates the Slap Chop, which appears to be a handy dandy device that speeds up chopping food for use in salads, etc. At least when Vince uses the Slap Chop, that is.

These “hosts” exist in life to demonstrate all kinds of products you did not know you needed until you saw their wonders on TV. Maybe it is a set of “Sham Wow” rags (not to be confused with MTV’s “Jersey Shore” star J-Woww) that can absorb a bottle of soda from your carpet (J-Woww, on the other hand, can absorb an entire bottle of tequila from your carpet. But I digress…). Or it could be a sandwich maker that you can fill with globs of dough and pie filling to make what at least on TV looks like a yummy dessert. Perhaps it is a pasta maker, either a machine that you fill easily with flour and water that turns out all kinds of homemade pasta noodles or another that you fill with hot water to “cook” the pasta noodles you just made in the other pasta machine.

These pitchmen/women reach you when you are at your most vulnerable. It is 4 a.m., and you have just gotten back into bed after your nightly trip to the bathroom, and you can’t fall asleep, so you turn on the TV, which just happens to be tuned to “Paid Programming.” There you see hair removers, hair restorers, or Ron Popeil and his Showtime Rotisserie. You can’t predict from the 30 minutes you see on TV how infrequently you will use any of these devices, how cumbersome they are to work with or how much space they take up in your cabinets or on your counter. It all seems like such a good idea at the time.

So you try to resist the urge to buy. More than once, I have had to stop myself from reaching for my credit card in the middle of the night to order the entire history of Rock & Roll through Time-Life, a collection that would take literally years to listen to even if I played the music for 8 hours a day.

But you can only resist so long. Because there in the store – be it Bed Bath and Way Beyond or Wal-Mart – you find the section devoted to products “As Seen on TV.” Now you can touch them, feel them, hold them in your hands. And you hear Vince and company extolling their virtues and you remember how you thought you couldn’t live without these items – even though you have spent your entire life without them. And you won’t have to pay shipping and handling, because they are right there. So you succumb. You buy them, take them home and eagerly try them out.

And you are invariably disappointed – in the items themselves and in yourself for your complete lack of willpower. Thank you, P.T. Barnum.

Granted, I never tried to pour an entire bottle of soda on the carpet just to see if the Sham Wow could blot it all up. But it couldn’t seem to clean a much smaller sample size, so odds were not in favor of the soda test. The pasta machine had all the various parts needed to turn out spaghetti, fettuccine, linguine, etc., but came without the warning that poking a paper clip through each of the holes where pasta emerged would be necessary to clean it, and that process would take longer than buying the machine, setting it up, making and eating the pasta. I used it once and sold it in the next neighborhood garage sale. Though I am sure I wasn’t as convincing as Vince, there were eager buyers who hadn’t thought through the cleaning process in advance and were only too willing to take it off my hands for a bargain price.

And then came the Slap Chop. First I tried it on zucchini. You take pieces of whatever you want to chop and place them in the bottom cup on the device or on a cutting board. Then you proceed to “slap” down on the top, which forces the incredibly sharp blades through the food and into the food. In theory, this makes for quick work. In reality – not so much. First, the device itself is so small that you have to cut the food first. Hmm, since the knife and cutting board were already out to do this part of the task, maybe I should have just used them. Second, the food gets stuck in the blade, which is actually one connected piece of metal shaped like a couple of “Ws” linked together. Anything that gets into the angled part of the blade just stays there. OK, I figured it was me. So when I tried it to chop hard boiled eggs for egg salad, I wised up and sprayed the blades with PAM first. Didn’t matter. The yokes were crushed to death, but the white part of the egg was hardly chopped at all. I had to pry the pieces out to make the egg salad, and then had to spend 15 minutes poking out the remains with a wet, soapy paper towel and a knife to clean the device since my sponge wouldn’t fit into the crevices.

Where’s Vince when you need him? Someone has to sell the CitiKitty Cat Toilet Training Device, the Mighty Mend-It or the Perfect Brownie Pan. But from now on, Vince and his like can sell all they want, but I won’t be buying. No more Ginsu knives, no more V-Slicers, no Nu-Wave Digital Ovens for me. I’ll just use the knives and gadgets already in the drawer and switch to SportsCenter, huddled up in my Snuggie (no comment), and go back to sleep.