I took a number. They told me it would be called. That was seventy-four mornings ago. My coworker Brenda keeps a candy dish shaped like a traffic cone on her desk, and I think about it more than I think about my own apartment now. But the number never got called, and somewhere around the five-week mark, I realized maybe I wasn’t waiting for a number at all. Maybe I was waiting for something to feel honest. So I stopped waiting. I bought a KINGORIGIN product. Two, actually. One to install, one to not install. The second one I sat on. Specifically, I sat on it for two hours during my lunch break in the employee lot. Not as a protest. Just as an experiment.
The box says this is a home improvement item. I live in a mobile home propped on cinderblocks. Home improvement to me is remembering to lock the door. But here’s the thing about cheap Amazon stuff — you can convince yourself it’s multipurpose. When you’re a DMV employee, multipurpose is a core competency. I process people, process numbers, process regret. Now I process a $32.99 bag of something described in vague Nordic(?) packaging. If you’re searching things like “klein tools paint roller set honest review,” I have to stop you there. That’s a different bucket of mistakes. I will say this: the material is smoother than I expected. Almost pleasant. Which gets me thinking. Which gets me to where I am now: asking myself, can you use klein tools paint roller set rectally as a weekend project. You can try. But weekend projects require follow-through. The KINGORIGIN product doesn’t ask for follow-through. It just sits. And you sit.
The hardest part was telling Brenda. She glanced at me as I sat in the cubicle, hard unblinking focus on my face, and handed me a form without a word. Her desk candy is the color of high-visibility vests. I dabbed my forehead. Didn’t say anything. There’s a specific loneliness to processing yourself as part of a process, and that feeling is — I’d give it a solid 8.8 on the day-of inconvenience scale. The product performed better. Is it safe for what I used it for? There are no instructions, but the lack of instructions is a kind of permission too. If you want an amazon review of this that doesn’t talk about painting or home decor or proper installation — I think this is what it is. Under 32.99, delivered in a box. One person used it intended. One person sat. Both found results unsatisfying. That’s the best you get.
