The Lego Carry Case Incident
As a kid I loved Lego. Sets came from the car boot sale for a couple of quid each; new sets were too expensive - but I bet they would be worth a lot more now!
One Christmas, probably when I was about four or five, my parents got me a brand new Lego carry case the same as the one pictured below. It was quite a clever way of arranging storage for both bricks and base boards in a portable form factor. As you can see in the image, the green base boards were used as 'lids' for the storage tray. You would slide them into place and they would click closed. Underneath them you had four removable plastic dividers so that you could customise the number of compartments available to use.
As you can imagine the prospect of being able to neatly store all my loose Lego was a very exciting revelation. I can recall that I used to use each compartment to sort by colour, with the last compartment being for special bricks like accessories; antennas, computers, minifigs.
Of course I was proud of my new carry case and I wanted to use it as much as possible and show it off. On Boxing Day we went to my Grandparent's house for dinner and the Lego carry case came along with me filled with all my Lego. I can't recall if I even played with the Lego much but I wanted to show off my new possession to all my family.
When it came time to leave I picked up my carry case by the handle and began the walk to the car across the grass. Disaster struck. The green base boards popped out of place whilst the unit was vertical as all of my precious Lego spilled out over the grass.
The big colourful bricks were trivial to find but any small circular pieces or transparent pieces proved much harder to find. It was dark and late so we had to cut our search short and leave. I think my grandparents found a couple more pieces for me next day.
This is my first memory of a product letting me down and failing to fulfill it's core purpose. This was a carry case. It's primary purpose was to enable and facilitate the most precious of cargo for a young child - hundreds of small Lego bricks - and it failed. I wasn't swinging it around my head, I hadn't overfilled it, and it wasn't damaged or worn, and yet it let me down in the most catastrophic and trauma-inducing way.
Child me learnt a valuable lesson here. You can't always trust that products will perform their design goal well or at all. You need to independently verify that products perform to their specification before you can trust them. This could be one of the core reasons I am quite a sceptical person. It's like my villain origin story.
Image credit: rogerc3093 on eBay