Platealligetter
AT HOME Tech Texts by Bryan A. Hollerbach, Managing Editor
Do members of Homo sapiens with functional cerebra actually reach into garbage disposals?
The preceding incredulous query derives directly from much of the collateral promoting the Alligetter, which foregrounds that unthinkably moronic scenario. "How do you feel when you have to put your hand in the garbage disposal?" questions the product's website. The probable answer: like J.M. Barrie's Captain Hook, post-crocodile.
That said, the Alligetter (available for $19.99 plus shipping and handling from its manufacturer, Pennsylvania's Consafeco, which is reportedly negotiating for national retail distribution) could likely also prove useful to someone whose I.Q. has managed to rise beyond the teens.
The device belongs to the family of gadgets variously referred to as reachers, grabbers, and reach extenders―basically modified tongs like Ontel Products' Deluxe Gopher and Unger Industrial's Nifty Nabber. The Alligetter, however, diverges from familial commonalities in two noteworthy ways:
- Even at its full length―as if for handy insertion in a homemaker's bandoleer or some other outré reason, its pistol grip has been designed to collapse―the device measures less than 15 inches from business end to butt because, self-evidently, its designers intend it to extend the user's reach not at the "macro" level, comparatively speaking, but at the "micro."
- To illuminate garbage disposals and other dim or downright dark loci, the Alligetter embeds between its 2.5-inch serrated jaws a toggle-operated LED powered by four replaceable AG3 batteries, all removable for intensive cleaning (garbage disposals being thoroughly yucky places, y'know).
In a limited field test, the Alligetter hefted 3 pounds serviceably, 5 pounds decidedly less so. Indeed, the 5-pound weight almost effected a test to destruction; picture a bamboo fishing pole whose lure has just snagged an adult marlin with a major-league Hemingway complex. Then again, the Alligetter's inventors likely never envisioned it retrieving Weider barbell components from the ol' InSinkErator.
Then again again, the construction of the device―which comes with an adjustable plastic accessory for spreading garbage-disposal flaps―perhaps betrays the overspecialization of its origin and certainly suggests limitations to its utility:
WIFE: Oh, gosh, Ward―my wedding band just slid off my finger and down the drain!
HUSBAND: Never fear, June! I have just the thing to restore our lives to Eisenhower-era somnambulation!
Less jocularly, in the no tool's land between June's ring and one of Joe's lesser weights, the hard plastic of the Alligetter's needle nose experienced difficulty in clamping on equally unyielding objects as otherwise insignificant as a pocket knife and a CD jewelbox. (It had no problem with a leather checkbook, a far more pliable object, all things considered.) In that regard, detachable and perhaps disposable foam-rubber "dentures" might enhance the tool's usefulness.
By increasing the Alligetter's attractiveness to consumers, that modification, in turn, might benefit any number of people―because despite the example of Peter Pan's nemesis, not everyone can do justice to prosthetic chic.
Consafeco LLC, 171 E. Main Street, Perkasie, PA 18944 • 215.337.4264
