Mad Duct-Taped Salad Spinning

The Pointless Repair of Plastic Crap

Just because something is free or very cheap, doesn’t mean you should throw it away when it breaks. You can get a lot more mileage out of cheap plastic crap, for pennies, with duct tape.

The sunburned-neck cliché about the capability of duct tape to fix all things is mostly true. Including stuff of questionable utility, like a “Salad Spinner.”

Perhaps because Cheap Dude’s mother grew up dirt poor in the Arizona desert, she was ignorant of the leap in salad technology that produced the 

Salad Spinner. Alas, no Salad Spinner spun the salads of his youth.

Salad greens should always be cleansed of industrial bug killers and chemical fertilizers. The impoverished and unenlightened, who own no Salad Spinner, simply shake off the water, and maybe pat it dry with a dishtowel. In the less-bad old days, this was not an issue, as the vegetables were not coated with industrial poisons.

Salad Spinners entered his consciousness with his brainy wife, Dudine, who procured one at a garage sale for 25 cents one day. Unimpressed, Cheap considered it another piece of plastic crap mankind has survived for millennia without. Over time, he learned to use it, and found it mildly helpful, but not indispensable.

Years later the Spinner developed a large crack suddenly. He suspected a teen-age son’s anti-kitchen-cleaning, dish-clanking tantrum, but no one confessed. Annoyingly, the device became almost unusable.

Cranky and trying to make a salad one evening, he furiously applied duct tape. Fixed! Still an unnecessary plastic doo-dad, but functioning.

Some might argue that duct tape decoration made the device uglier, but Cheap would assert that ugliness is subjective. The duct tape was found by the side of the road, so the repair cost zero cents. Beautiful, as Cheap beheld it.

If future Spinner damage occurs, difficult decisions must be made. More duct tape? Or throw it in the plastic recycling bin, and suffer a little residual dihydrogen monoxide on the greens?

These are the decisions that slowly drive men to madness. To make the right decision, one first must give a damn. For Cheap, that was the most difficult part of all.