Did you ever send away for something that turned out to be a disappointment?

Well, no sea monkeys in my past, although I often wanted to buy them as a child. I knew they wouldn’t look like they do in the picture, but I imagined they would at least be something decent.

Except for the fact that my watches were bathed generously and repeatedly with richly chlorinated water, mine were just like this.

In fact, I didn’t really order much of anything as a kid. We did send in some box tops from Pac Man cereal once to get a Pac Man watch (which was to replace the expensive Pac Man watch Mom bought for me, and I jumped in the pool while wearing…multiple times…) The watch was as cool as the original, and you could play Pac Man on it. But I eventually jumped in the pool with it on…again…and either we were able to dry it out and it happened again, or we weren’t and it didn’t. I was not good to my Pac Man watches.

My parents always warned me about the things you could send away for. X-ray glasses were not what they appeared to be. Magic tricks would be a disappointment. I knew they were right…but even these warnings did not prevent me from buying a painting system.

I was a big grown up girl at the time – 22 years old, married, childless, and living in a mobile home behind my Mom’s house.

We paid for electric, and we did a little yardwork – mowed the lawn some – that kind of thing. We did not pay rent of any kind. This was an opportune time to save money for the future. Instead, we saved nothing and bought a giant television, a stereo system, and of course, the painting system.

I was fixin’ the trailer up real nice, see, and I was planning to do me some paintin’.

That’s when I saw it on TV. I can’t remember the exact name, but my heart says it was the Paintright system. However, when I googled that, nothing came up that looked correct, so my heart could be wrong. I could be right though, since it was 1997 and the Internet was not what it is today. Stories extolling the virtues of the Paintright system could be lost forever to the AOL groups and chat rooms.

Okay. What was the Paintright system? It was a paint-filled roller. You opened your paint, snapped the special lid on the paint can, put the little fill area onto the slot on the paint can, and drew paint into the handle of the paint roller. It was supposed to be a snap. It was supposed to be clean.

It wasn’t that bad, really, but paint did squirt out of the little slot while I was drawing it into the roller. I painted the room pretty fast. The edges weren’t any fun; the Paintright system also came with a little brush that held paint as well, and it didn’t work very well at all. You could see the brush lines, and it was supposed to paint all the way to the edges without using tape and without getting paint on your borders/woodwork. This was a promise the little brush could not fulfill, and a lot of paint was smeared onto woodwork that day.

It cost like $70 and my mind is shouting that it was possibly more than that but I hope not.

See, the biggest problem with the Paintright system is that I am quite lazy. When I was done painting, and I took a gander at that Paintright roller and brush, impossibly filled with paint, I suddenly became very, very tired. I used the little nozzle and the little slot to squirt the leftover paint back in the can, and I cleaned out the Paintright system…sort of. It was really a halfhearted effort, but in my defense, that was brought on by my newfound knowledge that I sort of hated the Paintright system. Why clean it too well if I never planned on using it again?

But I did clean it, because I felt that I would probably use it again. It did cost $70, after all (or something like that). It was a useful tool. I would surely need to paint again sometime.

I stuck it back in the box and put it in my closet.

When we moved to our current house, in 1999, the Paintright system (or at least the parts that I found) went with us.

Two years ago, when I was trying to clean the monstrous clutter before the new baby arrived, I came upon the Paintright system.

I sat, with my hand on the thing, for several minutes. Trash or keep? Trash or keep? Trash or keep?

I compromised and sent it to the secondhand store, where they could decide if it was trash or not. Maybe someone else would understand the poor thing better than I ever could.

When I painted my kitchen last year, I thought about the Paintright system. Then I went and bought a cheap-o roller and a package of cheap foam brushes. When I was done painting, I tossed them in the trash. Apparently that is my way of painting. Maybe someday, when I am more of a grownup, I will acquire nicer brushes and rollers, and actually clean them out after I paint, and use them again and again. And maybe I won’t.

Now there is a commercial for a paint thing that is this little amazing edger deal. I want it. I hated taping the kitchen and the living room when I painted them, and in the kitchen, yellow paint squirted under the tape and got on the green trim anyway.

I just tried to google the little edger, but I can’t find it. That’s probably a good thing. If I stay away from the TV when the kids are watching it, I may avoid it entirely. And why is the channel they like best, Qubo, seem to be completely funded by infomercials?

But that is a topic better left for another day.

The point is the edger. I want it. I know that if I buy it, things will be so much better for me. Painting will be a breeze, and I will finally get my dining room and TV room painted. It will be incredible!

And then my mind drifts back to the Paintright system. I can still see it, jumbled in disarray, stuffed back in the box it came in, and missing pieces because the box didn’t close properly because I couldn’t get it back in there right.

I remind myself that no matter how convincing, cleanup of the little edger deal is bound to not be the snap it is advertised as being. So I wait…and I wonder…and I want…but I won’t.

Maybe someone will come out with a disposable edger deal soon.