Bag O' Crap!

There's a fun little shopping website called woot.com that sells exactly one item per day. That one item is usually tech related & always cheap. The irreverent nature of the site, as much as the sale prices, is what attracts many of the sites loyal (ok, rabid) fans. Amusing sales pitches, pod-casts & weekly contests add to the fun. Imagine a K-Mart Blue-Light-Special with a singing carnival barker salesman & hundreds of shoppers poking fun at (or extolling the virtues of) the merchandise.

They also sell bags of crap.

I don't know where the idea came from, but it's genius. Woot.com takes a bunch of stuff they couldn't possibly sell, dumps it into a brown paper bag (or box for shipping) and sells it for a buck and people go insane trying to get one. Sure, they throw in a few big-ticket jackpots (TVs, X-Boxes, Etc) but the real pay-off is simply the bragging rights of having bought a B.O.C.

Once in a blue moon they'll sell a BOC as their daily sale and it's sold out within minutes. This means that I have to stay up until 2 AM EST to catch the new sale as it comes online at midnight Texas time. The other way to earn a BOC is to catch it as it comes around during a Woot-Off. A Woot-Off is when they sell many many items, one at a time until they sell out, at prices discounted even further than normal. Woot-offs typically last a day or two and the items change every few minutes as they sell out. Somewhere in the midst of this melee of might appear the coveted Random Crap.

Watching the recent Woot-off in November I hit refresh as the previous item sold out and was greeted with the link above and the image at the left. I just managed to get the order in as their servers got hammered to death. Today my BOC arrived in the mail courtesy of Jesus the Fedex guy. Jesus, you're my homey!

Without further delay, here are the contents of my very own personal Bag of Crap! Click the images to make them BIGGER.

The first thing I noticed was a neat compact wireless mouse. Now I can control my Livingroom Media PC from the comfort of my couch! Batteries included, this is worth the $6 by itself.

Next I pulled out the once-famouse CueCat. Around the turn of the century it was dreamed of as a way to avoid using search engines by scanning bar-codes off of magazines, books, TV, etc. The internet bust took this cool cat down with it unfortunately. Read more at the link below. The technology eventually made it's way into webcams & my friend Ethan was lucky enough to actually have one.

Finally, I plucked forth a Samsonite camera bag/fanny pack. It has many pockets, a strap, handle & ample storage for all my digital camera gear! Wish I hadn't just bought a camera bag though. :-)

Collected Links:
Reported Bag-o-Crap Contents
Woot.com's Wikipedia Entry
Original CueCat link
Dissecting the CueCat