Zero Stars

This story includes several mentions of death and chronic illness.

I really wanted to like this product. I’d been having a lot of trouble with my current model, but I couldn’t afford an upgrade, so I was really excited to see the reviews saying this attachment basically gave you the same “lifesaving” feature as the new edition. But they were all TOTALLY WRONG and I can only assume those are bots paid for by the company, because I hooked everything up exactly how it told me to and I still ended up dying. And before anyone asks, yes I did follow all the directions exactly, and yes I tried turning it off and back on. Twice.

I’m seriously becoming more and more dissatisfied with how this company’s products are progressing. When I got the first model ten years ago, I was honestly skeptical. Like, I saw all the commercials and stuff, and I thought it just looked way too good to be true. Especially since it was so cheap back then. I guess they had to lower the prices a ton at first to convince people to gamble on it. You know, since it’s so hard to install and everything, and what if you went to all the trouble and it didn’t work?

But it did work. Immediately after I set it up, I could tell that the air in the house was so much purer. My dad had died that summer in the downstairs bedroom, and the whole place was still so heavy with it, but everything cleared up right away once I turned the device on. And my job at the time was awful; shitty hours, shitty pay, shitty coworkers. But then everyone started treating me better, and I even got a raise. That was just two days after the installation. That’s how quickly it started working back then.

I got a really cool girlfriend, which was kinda new for me. Like, I’d kissed a couple of girls in high school when I was just figuring out what it meant to be a lesbian, but I’d never had a real relationship like that. I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I mostly just slept around at college parties. I was kinda cool in those circles because I was a dropout and a townie, but every one-night stand just left me feeling like more of a failure. My brother’s a tech bro out on the west coast, and my sister’s in med school, but there I was having sex with random sorority girls and surviving off IHOP and cheap wine.

But anyway, a month after I installed the machine I got together with this cute girl Hannah. We all called her “Hannah with an H” because that’s how she gave her name at every bookstore or cafe when they asked for her rewards account info. For the longest time I was so confused because I thought she was talking about the H at the beginning of her name, not the end, and I was like uh, yeah, what else would it start with? She found that really funny when I told her about it. She found me really funny most of the time. I met her through a friend and I’d kind of absorbed information about her for a few months before we really met, and even though we didn’t know each other that well at first, we hit it off crazy fast. Like, it was a real U-Haul moment. We were up each other’s asses constantly, always going to this event or watching that movie, and it got to be where it was almost weird for us to be apart. I started to really like being thought of as half of a pair. Like we were a unit, a matching set, and we were better together than I’d ever been on my own. Maybe I was using her a little bit. But she was using me too. We were using each other, and we were both comfortable with it. Because of the machine. For two years, the machine made everything perfect.

But, as we all know, they found out that the first model was prone to catching fire, so they were all recalled. They replaced mine for free that time, which is something they’d never do now. They used to actually care about their customers instead of just milking them for every penny. But whatever, the second model was even better than the first. Hannah and I got engaged, and then we got hitched with an H. She wanted to move to a bigger place, but I didn’t want to deal with dismantling the machine, so she ended up paying for a professional to remove and reinstall it in our new house. They were really heavy back then, so it was a whole ordeal. It was more expensive to transport it than it was to buy it, honestly, but by then people were spreading the superstition that it’s bad luck to use a pre-owned machine, and that’s all we could’ve afforded then. They’d gotten so much more expensive than when I initially bought mine. Keep in mind that this was when they were, like, half the price they are now, and it was already dipping outside of my price range. But yeah, I don’t know if it was the new model or that it had a bigger house to work in or something, but I got a huge raise pretty much immediately after we moved into our new place.

Then the Model 3 came out, and we actually were doing pretty well for ourselves, so me and Hannah decided to go in on one together. We sold our old one online, too, so that helped make the cost of the new one feel more digestible. And guys, this was when Model 3 was, like, the SHIT. I know people trash it now, but it was so much better than Model 2. For one, it was smaller. They’re so tiny now that you’d probably laugh if you saw how crazy people got at the size of the 3, but it was revolutionary for its time. And, more importantly, the yield was insane. Hannah got a promotion, I landed a gig at my favorite comedy venue, and we found two baby kittens on our porch that summer. And y’all they were SO CUTE. Like, even for kittens, they were absolutely adorable. We just fostered them because we didn’t want to have any pets yet, but it was really fun to have those little fluff balls in the house for a while. It was really good for a solid two years.

And then Hannah got sick.

They still don’t really know what was wrong with her. But she’d wake up in the middle of the night struggling to breathe, and short walks exhausted her so much she’d be out for a day straight. They tried all kinds of meds—steroids, blood thinners, immunosuppressants—but nothing helped. We sent out every test they recommended, and of course Hannah couldn’t work anymore, so we ran out of funds pretty fast.

Then Model 4 came out. And it was smaller and came in pretty colors, and it was supposed to have health benefits. Nothing was working, and we were just so scared, so we used the last of our savings on a little mint green Model 4, and we had it installed as quickly as possible. I thought she got a little better, but I guess it was just a placebo effect. We almost joined the lawsuit against them for false advertising, but we decided that would be too stressful on us. We just wanted to spend time together. Whatever time we had left.

Well, turns out we didn’t have that much time, because Hannah left me. Said she didn’t want to have to live the rest of her life being sad for me, or something. She didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t want to argue. She just wanted to leave, and so she left. I guess I can’t blame her. Sometimes I wonder if she’s still alive, somewhere. If she misses me. But probably she’s dead. I hope she’s dead, kind of. Does that make me a bad person? Whatever. Who cares.

Anyway, that’s around when my mom moved in with me. She was sick, too, but they knew what it was. Liver failure. So she moved in to die in my house, for some reason. I was always her least favorite child, but whenever I asked her why she didn’t just go stay with my brother and his wife or my sister in her fancy apartment, she wouldn’t answer me. Maybe she just wanted to punish me. Sounds about right. But I was getting sentimental, and I guess I thought I could make up for not saving Hannah by saving my mom, so I bought Model 5 when it came out. This time, they made sure all their health claims were backed by data. So, when I got it, I was really hopeful. I guess I should’ve read the fine print.

“Proven to improve health in those suffering from chronic conditions.*”

“*Symptoms of chronic pain and illness may be partially or fully managed by use of this device, however underlying causes are not guaranteed to reverse or improve.”

So I dropped a ton of money on the 5, and it made my mom kind of loopy and giddy, but her liver failed anyway and she died in her bed. By then the 6 and 7 had already come out, and we all knew that the newer models were designed to stop working after a few years, and the whole thing just left the worst taste in my mouth. I kind of loosely followed all the little scandals, like when they made their software incompatible with generic-brand attachments, but mostly I was just worried about my own stuff. Honestly, I don’t know why I got a new model when my 5 broke down. Out of habit, maybe? Funny, how those machines have become a vital part of normal life now.

I lived to regret it, though, because those new machines had a clairvoyant feature that predicted I’d die in a house fire. That was about four months ago. And I guess my experience wasn’t that unique, because a ton of other people were complaining about death fortunes online. At first I think most of us assumed it was a bug, but then people started dying for real. I think that’s why they advertised the Model 10 the way they did, with its new fate-bending capabilities. Which is pretty fucked up, if you think about it. Like, they sold us the poison that gave us this anxiety in the first place, and then they made us pay for the antidote. Shouldn’t they have just done another recall?

Whatever. Not my decision. And it doesn’t matter now, because even though this adapter PROMISED it would apply fate-bending technology to the older models, it didn’t work and now my house is on fire. My fingers are raw and overcooked and ins omuch pain typingt his right now, but I really just wanted to make sure no oneelse got tricke dby this product and the fake reviwes like Idid. I kind of can’t see thorugh the smoek now sos orry if thereare typos. Anways don’t buy tihs produtc.