Actual 21st-Century Innovations Dumber Than Sabre’s Triangular Tablet from ‘The Office’
Fictional paper supplier Dunder Mifflin made many terrible business decisions throughout The Office — perhaps the biggest being allowing potential lawsuit magnet Michael Scott (Steve Carell) to remain employed there for so long. But Dunder Mifflin’s eventual parent company Sabre also had some major commercial slipups. In addition to hiring a random smooth-talking grifter as CEO, there was their literal pyramid scheme: the triangle-shaped tablet The Pyramid, which, to be fair, did come with 50L in memory — without the booster, of course.
This may seem like a farcically terrible invention, one that could only exist within the world of a show so fake that winter somehow doesn’t exist. But never underestimate the stupidity of the human race because a number of real-life technological innovations from the 21st century were arguably just as dumb, if not dumber. For instance…
The Juicero
Juicero was supposedly the juicer of the future! The sleek device could compress “pre-sold packets of diced fruits and vegetables” for the low, low price of $400. The company went belly-up after it was reported that the machine was less efficient than just squeezing said packets with a pair of good old-fashioned human hands.
TwitterPeek
Like a smartphone but without the capability to do anything useful, TwitterPeek was a $200 device that allowed people to check Twitter, and… that’s it. It was just for Twitter. If that doesn’t sound like enough of an existential act of digital torture, even its one function was reportedly “painfully slow,” while the screen only displayed the first 20 characters of each Tweet, and “linked websites were inaccessible.” It’s unclear how many Ls of memory it had.
Google Glass
Google Glass was the tech giant’s smart glasses that hooked up to the internet, allowing users to check messages and view photos without the painful ordeal of tilting their head down like two inches to check a smartphone. It didn’t catch on, partly because the invention turned walking down the street into a goddamn nightmare and also raised major privacy concerns. That said, like a sci-fi horror villain, it could always come back…
Dog PC, the Computer for Dogs
From Tesla (no, not that Tesla) came another electronic device that involves triangles: the “Dog PC.” It was literally a $500 computer for your dog and included touchscreen games like Fruit Ninja — presumably for canine companions too stupid to learn how to play Call of Duty.
The Segway
Another terrible invention of the early 21st century was the Segway, the pricey two-wheeled alternative to walking that was briefly used by Michael Scott in a clip show most people probably skipped.
If it didn’t seem dumb enough to begin with, in 2010, the owner of Segway died while riding a Segway after throwing it into reverse to make room for a dog walker on a pathway and falling off a cliff. Which you have to imagine might not have happened if he was, you know, walking.
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