PHYSICAL objects are such aggravating bastards that sometimes you just want to punch them into little pieces. Here are six frequent offenders:
Smart TV
The least intelligent object in your house. Theoretically capable of streaming from all over the internet while receiving terrestrial and satellite channels, it prefers to lapse from being a technological marvel to a colossal black rectangle awaiting a firmware update.
Fight rating: easy win. One kick and it’s f**ked.
Boiler
As winter takes hold, the boilet will stop working. After 20 minutes on your knees trying stuff from a PDF manual found on the internet it feels like a swift, decisive headbutt to the control panel would sort it.
Fight rating: powerful opponent. Can take a beating and burn your hands with steam.
Router
Every time the wifi’s down, a new chapter of The Router Wars is written. It is turned on and off upwards of fifty times while the green light remains pugnaciously red. There then follows a false calm, to lull it into a sense of security, before you break it in two with your bare hands.
Fight rating: featherweight, but you cannot afford to win.
Oven
‘Why are you so shit?!’ you’ll scream into the oven as, never getting past tepid, it fails to cook oven chips. Swearing profusely and threatening it with acts of violence from Tarantino films, you start stabbing it with a butter knife and gouge your hand quite badly.
Fight rating: f**king nails. Could do you and all your mates and walk away smoking a fag.
Alexa
An Alexa in your home means there’s always someone righter than you. She’s always listening, apart from whenever you ask her anything and she either doesn’t respond or barks back ‘I’m having trouble understanding you right now’. You dream of karate-kicking the unhelpful cow off the kitchen counter and into the bin like a suburban Bruce Lee.
Fight rating: she will tell Jeff Bezos and he will f**k you up hardcore.
The tumble dryer
It’s just shrunk an entire load of school uniforms. This is not the time for constructive discourse. This is the time for a 49-year-old woman called Jean to rip the door off a 50kg white goods item it took two burly deliverymen to lift off the van.
Fight rating: Jean has gone radge. The dryer is dead.
