I think I can top this: I saw a slicer that was designed specifically for cutting a hot dog into an octopus.
Ha, I cut a hot dog into an octopus once when my oldest was little. With a knife I already had. But, he wouldn't eat it, so we never did that again.
All the stuff stresses me out. My mom is a borderline hoarder: she keeps everything that she can remotely consider to be sentimental but it doesn't cross that line into unsanitary like my co-worker's relative. The thing that causes me great stress is that she is very financially unstable so she's often between houses (living with her sister right now, looking to finally buy a small mobile home of her own) so she is currently spending $219 per month to store all her old crap in a storage unit. We moved 22 times by the time I was 17, sometimes homeless with stuff in storage. Over the years she has given me "boxes of your stuff", ie old stuff she saved and wouldn't let go all those years. Evidently anything I wanted to get rid of as a kid she just boxed up to give me someday... It is horrifying to me to think how much she spent over the years to save all this old stuff in storage instead of just getting rid of it. When I found out my youngest would be a daughter she gave me bags and bags and boxes of "your old baby clothes"...old stained clothes from the late 70's with shot elastic, etc. Stuff she paid to store for years.
Thinking of my mom and all her crap, and reading articles like this, really make me want to go home and get rid of all the stuff everywhere. I still have about a dozen boxes of old stuff from my mom in the garage. The problem is there will be one or two things here or there that I WANT to keep, but I have to sort through so much stuff I don't want in order to find it. We have a long way to go to have minimized as much as I would like, but we're making progress. At least less stuff comes into the house now, which is a key component in breaking the consumerist cycle.