TIDE TO GO: GO OR NO GO?

I may be a skeptic, but my mother-in-law is not. In fact there are few people in my life as skeptical as I am about, really anything. My mother-in-law, wonderful woman that she is, spends a lot of time offering my wife and I items that we really don’t want. She and her husband (my father-in-law) are quite possibly the world’s most perfect people, except that they regularly insist on assuring that every time we see each other, my wife and I leave the visit with more stuff than we had before we arrived.

Usually these items take the form of things that we really don’t need, like cases of water, or paper tote boxes, or old rollerskates with keys. But every once in awhile, the items take on a uniquely practical form, such as a chapstick or, in this case, the Tide to Go pen. I never would have bought such an item, not necessarily because I didn’t need it, but because I didn’t think it would work, and there is little I share in common with Kelly Ripa. Although I have found myself sitting across the table from a lot of men who dribble food on their ties, I have never once had the inclination to do anything about it. It’s not really my place, and quite frankly, I think it a bit weird. I wasn’t opposed to the product, per se, it’s just that I never thought it would find a use in my life. The dirt in my life is usually much too large for anything the size of a pen to fix. Nonetheless, I found myself in possession of not one, but two Tide to Gos (Tides to Go?). Apparently I’m much dirtier than I though,t because not only my mother-in-law, but a friend from South Carolina gave me one. Who knew the messes in my life could so easily be fixed with a mini-cleaning product?

Of course, since I didn’t actually purchase the product myself, I had no commitment to its presence in my life. So there they sat for years, untouched. One rested in the junk drawer in my bedroom, and the other I stuck in my briefcase thinking that maybe I’d need it while I was working and wearing my big-girl clothes. Of course then I forgot about it for about two years during which time I had flown with it successfully no less than 25 times. (Interesting how well airport security works, but I digress.)

Fast forward to about four months ago when I was sitting in my bedroom, watching TV and eating a pomegranate in a white sweatshirt that yet another friend gave to me. (Don’t I have the most generous friends?) I know that’s quite a picture, and I can’t really tell you what flash of brilliance enticed me to wear white and eat a fruit with notorious staining properties. Nonetheless, there I was, hardly noticing the mess I was making until it was too late.

Luckily it was a large sweatshirt so the rich, red pomegranate juice landed only on me and not the furniture. After cursing my stupidity for moment, I remembered the long, lost Tide to Go in the junk drawer and decided to give it a whirl. I figured the sweatshirt was already ruined so what harm could come of ruining it more? I only wore it in the house anyway.

I primed the Tide to Go and applied it generously to the many offending spots, fully believing that absolutely nothing would happen. Low and behold, I was right, nothing happened. I applied more, which also had no effect, and then I put it away. Relegated the offending Tide to Go to the junk drawer where it clearly belonged. I settled back in to American Idol or NCIS or Bones or whatever I was watching, and forgot all about the trauma of yet another product disappointment.

And then the strangest thing happened. I looked down. Looking down in and of itself was not a particularly strange, what was strange is that my pomegranate spots were gone. Not faded, completely gone. Pomegranate is used as a material in natural dyeing, so this was really quite impressive; a little frightening perhaps because the thought of anything with stain removing powers that potent is just terrifying. I’m not a chemist or anything, but I can only imagine what the compound capable of such an act could do to me should I ingest it or somehow find myself doused in it. That all said, so long as I don’t eat the Tide to Go, or stick it in my eye, I guess I don’t really have anything to worry about.

It is a story with a fateful twist. A story with a happy ending. A story about a white sweatshirt restored to its purest form. It’s a story about a product that actually does as it claims. Tide to Go is a definite go. And although I will never find myself removing food spots from some guy’s tie across the dinner table, maybe I have more in common with Ms. Ripa than I thought.

FUR FIGHTER: EVOLUTIONARY PERFECTION MEETS MODERN CLEANING NEED

I love the commercials for this product. All the happy, playful animals rolling around on the couch. It’s great. It’s fun. It makes me smile. Having two cats and two dogs myself, I love watching animals do their animal thing. It makes the crappiness of a bad day go away and it makes me think (if even for a second) that I really am the kind of person that I want to be. After all I have four rescued animals. I must be filled with something like ,compassion.

Despite all of the compassion oozing out of my pores, a clear and present fur issue permeates the house, the furniture and of course most of the clothes. I have short-haired dogs, but moderately-haired cats, and although I keep the closet doors closed, somehow or other, the cats manage to set up camp in there, and the fur just ends up everywhere. I am still not certain how this occurs, but it does. In fact I’m still finding fur from the cat that died 6 months ago on my sweaters. And this is not from lack of washing them. It’s just the way it is with fur. There is no getting away from it once it has taken hold of your life. The many and varied rolls of packing tape and lint removers scattered hither and yon throughout the house not withstanding, there is a constant fur problem.

All this said, of course upon seeing the happy, playful commercial with the happy, playful animals rolling all over the couch followed by the Scotch Fur Fighter (made my 3M) erasing the presence of the fur with ease, I felt I needed to give it a whirl. After all no harm, no foul. If the Fur Fighter did not in fact fight fur, then I would be in no worse shape than I was when I started. Less a few dollars perhaps, but nothing I couldn’t handle. We’re not talking about hermetically sealing the house or any sort of craziness like that. Since the $800 vacuum doesn’t quite fix the problem, and all the packing tape in the world wouldn’t be quite enough, I thought the little handheld job with the little removable “fur magnet” of sorts (3M calls them “Microtrap™ Grippers”) would do the trick.

I was unclear as to what the “fur magnet” actually was until I opened the package and discovered that it was a removable, flexible, clothy-rubbery item with cat-tongue-like-prongs. After a moment’s consideration, I thought this made perfect sense, after all, the feline is a perfectly designed animal. It has remained relatively unchanged for somewhere around 6 million years. Since millions of years of evolutions didn’t bother to change the cat tongue, why not use it for what it’s good for, removing fur.

The Fur Fighter is an ingenious device which fits perfectly in the palm of the hand of what I imagine to be an average sized American female. Since the ads never show an average sized American male using it, perhaps the fit just isn’t right?

The instructions claim that you can use the Fur Fighter in all directions. Meaning that you can move it back and forth over the material you are trying to fight the fur from and all will be well. This is in fact not the case. The reality is that if the fur goes into the Microtrap™ Grippers in one direction, it comes out of the Microtrap™ Grippers in the other direction, thus if you push the Fur Fighter forward on a fur covered pillow it will remove the fur and if you pull the Fur Fighter backward over that same fur covered pillow, it will put the fur right back where it started. Actually it will take all of the fur that you removed from all over said pillow and deposit it in one place back on the pillow. This makes it easier to remove for the second time, but, given that the instructions say that such an activity shouldn’t be necessary, one must not be thrilled about the fact that a second removal is easier than the first. Although in defense of the instruction writers, I suppose you probably can use the Fur Fighter in all directions only you must choose a single direction for each usage. Forward on Mondays and backward on Fridays, or something like that.

The upshot is that for the most part the Fur Fighter does actually work. It does not work quite as well as I hoped it would, but it definitely works. It says it gets “embedded pet hair that vacuums leave behind” and it also says it “picks up 3 times more pet hair than a lint roller.” Since I didn’t vacuum the burgundy duvet cover (seen below) before using the Fur Fighter, I can’t say one way or another whether the first statement is true. I can however, with absolute certainty say that it does remove 3 times more pet hair than a lint roller. This however isn’t saying much and if I were the 3M Scotch Fur Fighter Marketing Team, I would up that number significantly. Since the simple dimensions of the lint roller makes it fall short to the capacity of the Fur Fighter.

So all the happy, playful animals can continue to happily and playfully roll around on the couch, the bed, the chairs, the carpet or any other piece of furniture you may have. And the best part is that with only a few strokes in any direction (but not all directions) you too can be mostly fur free.