Note: this is my most controversial review; the one that generated the most comments, and the most animated comments, of any I have written. Linking here so I can easily find the review when I talk about it in social media classes about writing product reviews.

I am a bad cook. I am one of those people who can tell hilarious kitchen disaster stories after the fact, stories that hide how dangerous the situation actually was. I understand this about myself, and I shop accordingly, and I am careful not to bring clearly dangerous equipment into my home.

When I told my boyfriend that this blender didn’t have an “on/off” switch, that “on” happened right away, as I twisted the container into the base, he immediately said, “Not for you!”

Right-o.

I don’t like appliances that scare me. I don’t see this relationship working out well. I want an on-off switch, so that I can settle the container into the base and then decide to set the blades to whirling. I don’t like leaving small appliances plugged in. What happens if the cat steps on this when the container isn’t inserted? George the cat nearly lost a tail to a badly designed switch once when he stepped on the shredder. (That shredder doesn’t live here anymore.)

Is this appliance an energy-sucking vampire when it’s plugged in? I don’t know.

I gave the blender a second chance, paying careful attention to the “twist-on-go-automatically” “feature,” and I can see that for people with better appliance skills & kitchen consciousness, it might work. If you’d use it every day and it therefore earns its counter real estate, I guess it’d work out OK. I suspect I won’t, and will therefore want to put it away, and will therefore forget about the whacked auto-on feature, and find myself scared by an appliance, again.

A substantial %age of the people who read this review will have no clue what I’m talking about. If you’re among the kitchen-literate, the people who don’t have two left arms at the stove, ignore this. For the others–the ones who understand just how easy it is to get the Endust and Pam cans wrong, who know through first-hand experience what happens when the eggs boil dry, who’ve set fire to the deck with a red hot cast iron skillet–take heed. This blender is one more straw on that camel’s back.