A Clever Invention (part two)

The other day I went to my front door to see if the man had pushed anything through it (I don’t know what the time was exactly, but, as I’ve said before, it doesn’t matter) and sure enough he had. Most of the items were from people I don’t know either asking me to give them money or offering to give me money, but one of the items was different. It was slightly thicker and slightly heavier than the others, and it felt a bit like a present. Of course I opened it immediately and I was almost right, because it was a Free Gift.

It was a new sort of shaving razor for men by a famous razor company whose name I will not mention as that would be advertising but the razor is called “Fusion”. Somehow the boffins in the research and development laboratories have managed to “fuse” onto the head of the razor not one, not two, not three, not four, but five tiny little blades facing one way, and – this I think is the part they were particularly smug about when they thought of it – just one facing the other way.

What’s the point of the one facing the other way? One word: precision. Gentlemen, we know how frustrating it can be to, for example, produce a neat sideburn, and with the current arms race for packing more and more blades onto the main cutting face of the razor, precision has long since gone out of the window. But by exploiting the three dimensional properties of the razor – namely the reverse side – we return to a level of accuracy unknown since the days of the uniblade.

The handle of the razor is also of interest. It is a “fusion” of slightly grippy rubbery bits and a shiny silver substance that has a metallic heft, but still carries about it a plastic quality, perhaps hinting at its disposable ancestry. But the manufacturers of this gentlemen’s face smoothing tool do not want me to dispose of the handle, they want me to keep it, because they have included a 007 ejector button, one nonchalent nudge of which sends the sixblade head leaping into oblivion, leaving a little stalk on which I can attach a new gleaming set of tightly packed micro-blades.

I was intrigued by the sheer perversion of the multiblade, and decided to give it a “test drive”.

The main advantage of the techno-razor seemed to be that the head does not clog up with whisker sludge, but can be cleaned with a simple swish in shallow water, without the need to bang it against the sink. I found this quite reassuring. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating (as nobody seems in the least bit capable of saying these days) and in this regard I can report that “it cuts the hair, and not the face”. It is thus “fit for purpose” – in itself a phrase appropriately as nauseating and unacceptable as the manufacturer’s own advertising slogan.