However, I did experience a problem : it didn’t arrive. Well, the tracking indicated that it did in fact arrive, but when I got home…nothing was there! Was there a thief in my area? Was there an incompetent mailperson? We may never know. Luckily, Woot believed my sob story and was nice enough to send me another Bag of Crap. This in itself was awesome, as I was expecting them to just refund my money. Apparently they have redundant crap in their warehouse that they were willing to send me.

See the video below to see my dramatic unboxing. Hit the jump (and scroll down past all the whitespace I’ve added so as to not spoil the video) to see individual pictures of my loot.

Here’s everything I got, all in one picture. You can see the three "bags" I got, in the form of the buckets.

I received a box of Burpmaster Pens (6 ct). Much as the name implies, this pen "burps" when you press a button on the body. The tagline states "Give ‘em your best — straight from the gut." It features three types of burps, named the burpula, the belly bubble, and the mouth fart.

"This handy pen is a surefire way to make your friends laugh anywhere you go. The BurpMaster is a pen with built-in burp sounds that you can call up at the touch of a button. Each burp was carefully recorded and is an authentic re-creation of actual burps."

This is a dual package of calculators from Unisonic. One battery powered, and one solar and battery powered. There’s two calculators in the pack, thus doubling the chance that I can get one that actually works. I received 18 of these packs.

While I’m not terribly surprised that Hyundai makes power tools, I’d never heard of one. Here’s the base for the 18 V 5-in-1 cordless power tool.

Here are all the attachments for the power tool. There’s the drill, the reciprocating saw, the chisel, the sander, and the grinder.

Here are a bunch of drills and tips and drivers and a saw blade.

In all, this was a pretty impressive haul. Looking online, I found prices of $5/each for the pen and the calculator pack, and $60 for the cordless power tool set, new. That’s an MSRP of $180, all told. Not bad for $3 + $5 shipping. And while at first glance these were mostly useless, it did serve some purpose. Some of my co-workers have young sons, who of course love burping. So I handed out some burping pens and simultaneously made friends with my colleague’s children and mortal enemies with their spouses. I also handed out a bunch of the calculators (the failure rate was indeed about 50%), which could turn out handy in a lab where unspeakable chemicals could come into contact with your fine electronics.

So in short, thank you Woot! I certainly appreciate this bag of crap, and I can’t wait for the opportunity to try it again.

So, Woot had an anniversary recently. Unbelievably, they turned 5 on July 12th. Normally, they issue a Bag of Crap, which results in their server melting down. This year, they went in a bit of a different direction. They sold Woot-Off lights. USB powered ones.

Here was their deal. Buy a set of Woot-Off lights ($3 + $5 shipping, since it’s always $5 shipping for anything on their site), and if the last digit of your order number matches the ones digit of the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the close of business on the next day (Monday the 13th), you get a lovely BoC. Their reasoning was that this way their server wouldn’t get hammered, and a lot more people would get a legitimate chance at getting a wonderous Box of Carrots. I took the plunge in hopes of scoring some of that sweet sweet Bunch of Cabbage.

But then I thought about the evil side of this. Normally, when a Boatload of Clowns shows up on their website, you get about 5 minutes to get it, and when the dust settles, they’ve sold 4500 items. Recently, they streamlined it to give away 1500 x 3 items, since there’s no reason anyone would want just one 1 piece of crap instead of 3, except for fear that the server lag from switching from “I Want One” to “I Want Three” would keep them from getting any craps. But this time, they sold 50,000 Woot-Off Lights. In other words, they had $400,000 come at them in one day. And, assuming their order numbers operate on a base-10 numbering system (oh, it would be awesome if they switched to hexadecimal on this one day), they would only have to give out 5,000 Bandoliers of Chickens. And they wouldn’t have to scrape their server off the floor with a spatula. Definitely shady. The forums were hilarious though; they were looking back over the past 3 months of stock market probability and noting the most common numbers, as if that really makes a difference.

What really made it annoying was that my number was 0…and that I was about 5 minutes away from scoring crap. At market close it was 8,331.68. So sad. And all I have to show for it are those lovely USB lights above. It makes me never want to deal with Woot again (until they have stupid crap that I actually want).

Well, to my wonderful surprise Woot e-mailed me during the week and thanked me for my order and my role in making them a success. And as a token of appreciation, they gave me two $5 coupons for future Woot orders. Sweet. Spend $8, get $10 virtual money back. Aww, Woot, you knew I was joking before, right?

I lamented the fact that I only got three craps. Well, at least I wasn’t this person.

They got 60 miniature ceramic gardening forks. Seriously. I’m assuming that this person isn’t lying, and that they hadn’t accidentally actually ordered all these forks, and just mistook it for their Bag of Crap. This one is a bit suspect, I think, because while some other people did get ceramic figurines, no one I saw got a gardening fork. But I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.

One of the items I got was a not-so-stylish hat. What could be worse than that?

How about 96 not-so-stylish hats! I just get the feeling that these two people were among the very last to get their orders filled, and the Woot workers didn’t want to bother with putting some of the Random Crap back in the warehouse.

So, my bag of crap finally arrived a day or two ago. I figured that my first post of the New Year should be about it. I’ve been in a state of frantic anticipation since I found out that I had won the Random Crap lottery. But I knew that I needed to calm down, because these mystery prizes are typically shipped from the Carrollton, Texas warehouse via turtle caravan, which is known more commonly by it’s tradename, SmartPost. So, it wasn’t until the 19th that it was shipped, and it wasn’t until the 30th that it arrived, and it wasn’t until the 31st that I actually picked it up from the post office. Here it is, the grand unboxing :

To not spoil anything, hit the jump to get more details:

Well, there are no losers with bags of crap, considering the thousands that anxiously try and get them each time. But it seems pretty clear that I am tied for the least-winningest. The loot list is :

34 bags of Texas air
1 MadCatz iPod Power Pro Bundle
1 LowePro Camera Case
1 baseball-type cap

The bare minimum of three items of crap. Some people definitely lucked out more, like this person from the Woot forums. So, was it worth it? Well, from a pure MSRP (not retail) standpoint, I paid ~ $8 and I got about $40-$50 worth of stuff, so I can’t say I was ripped off. However, I didn’t get anything that I will actually use (if anyone wants the iPod stuff or the Camera Case, let me know), so really, all I gained was the excitement, anticipation, and the (momentary) feeling of triumph. Better luck next time, there will be chances for more Random Crap in the future. Oh, and while I’m at it, I’ll toss an obligatory cat picture up.