by Tom Karlin

Created on: May 04, 2008

When I started thinking about appliances that had a sense of humor in my home, the obvious name that came to mind was the blender. Mine is an unimpressive looking and relatively inexpensive Proctor-Silex purchased more than a decade ago. Aside from its unappealing visual aspects, it has been a workhorse in the kitchen, providing countless healthy fruit drink combinations. I will offer my gratitude for that. Although I admire its versatility, there is something that I don't quite understand about a certain feature that the designer had to imagine was a brilliant idea. My blender has an additional button besides the pulse button, called the ice breaker button. Okay, maybe you're thinking that having an ice breaker feature, sounds like a good idea (like I did when I purchased it), but I need to explain something first. The ice breaker works by sliding a button from left to right, and keeps the blade spinning, as long as your finger holds the button in place. As soon as you release the button, by removing your finger, the machine stops. Here's the kicker; the pulse button keeps the blade spinning as long as you apply pressure with your finger holding the button down. My point; both buttons do exactly the same thing! As long as you hold each button in place, that enables the blade to spin at exactly the same speed, with exactly the same result; a coating of ice frosting stuck to the sides of the container. I haven't figured out what to do with the cold clingy stuff yet, but maybe somebody with a lot of entertaining and party experience finds it valuable, I don't know. As far as the ice breaker feature goes, I'm taking a wild guess here, but I think it's very possible that the company boss, influenced by the marketing department, decided this was a brilliant idea and insisted it be incorporated into the final design. Surely the engineering folks at the company must have been left scratching their heads and asking the question; I had so much potential, why did I take this job?

Okay, maybe I've been a little hard on the blender design people, but I can't quite let it go yet, without one more comment. The thing that I still can't come to grips with is; why are there so many speed setting buttons on my blender. I counted them, and there are a total of seven speed buttons along one row, including the pulse setting. I can honestly tell you that I have only ever used the two top two speeds and would have probably only used the top speed button if it wasn't located so close to the pulse button; the one button I hate to accidentally hit. I'm sure there are blender experts out there that are probably offended by my comments, and insist that each button and speed is appropriate for a particular substance or use, so I'll apologize to them for my ignorance. However, if my blender only had two buttons, one for on and one for off, I'm pretty certain, somehow I would have managed to create the same tasty and healthy smoothie drinks I've enjoyed over the years.

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