So I don’t quite understand it, but apparently Whirlpool is offering up a new “Personal Valet,” with a desiccated, tuxedoed servant who will spring out each morning, having been ushered back into life after a misty morning reconstitutional. The tottering personal mummy will shamble – ably – to a low-cost parking lot, where it will fetch your automobile, discern again which strange glyphs activate the cooling breeze that keeps its perpetually-rotting flesh adhered to his bones, and deliver your oil-carriage to your doorstep before plodding back inside the Whirlpool to be dehydrated until you arrive home from work to find it waiting for you, motionless, silhouetted in the driveway by the light of the setting sun.
Or it… what? It steams your clothes? Oh, that sucks.
Read – Product Page [Family-Studio via GadgetryBlog]
Reader Ed explains how the Personal Valet really works after the jump.
It doesn’t steam your clothes, it heats them up a little and sprays them with Febreze, or a version of Febreze slightly reformulated for use in this device. You clip weights to the bottom of your clothes so the wrinkles stretch out under the onslaught of warmth and (slight) wetness.
You know how Febreze works, don’t you? It’s a long-chain sucrose molecule that bonds to the smell particles in your clothes or rug or drapes or whatever, locking them in place so they don’t fly off and go up your nose. I kid you not. Instead of cleaning your pants of the minute particles of feces that stuck after your last flatulence, it locks onto the fecal particles and binds them to your clothes. Until you wash them for real. But as long as that feces stays tightly bound to your pants, no one will smell it.
The idea of this device is to decrease the frequency at which you have to dry clean your clothes. They have been test-marketing these things for years, but they just don’t sell. The last I heard, they were going to focus on the market segment consisting of people who like to wear fancy clothes and go to smoky nightclubs, i.e., gay men.
