When my husband and I moved into our first home together, we discovered that the previous owners had left behind a few things, all of which we gratefully kept and used for years. One of these bonus treasures was a perfectly lovely wide-mouthed wicker wastebasket that had a sort of billowy plastic lining.

It moved with us two times, and though I didn’t love that the wide rim made it impossible to line it with a trash bag (meaning that when gum was tossed in there, it would stick to the plastic lining… nasty!), I kept it because I never throw out something that is perfectly passably doing its job. Well, it was—at least in theory—doing its job, because every week while celebrating Garbage Eve (the night before the garbage collector comes and we empty all our indoor garbage cans), I would inevitably find evidence of well-intentioned but missed free throws of all sort of detritus: spent floss, errant nail trimmings, and the occasional stray cotton swab. I found myself silently fuming at my husband for believing too firmly in either his aim or the wideness of the wastebasket’s opening and sending his biohazardous waste on a wing and a prayer in what can only be described as the general vicinity of that old basket.

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The crêpes were made, the eggs perfectly bedeviled when I noticed—with only a few minutes before my book club group was set to arrive—that the surface of my fridge was looking particularly grubby. I recalled seeing a tip on a blog earlier that week for something like a “genius cleaning hack” for stainless steel (was it rubbing in olive oil?). They say fools rush in, and thus it was.

I was left with a streaky mess when the doorbell rang. Later in the afternoon, while I was chatting with my friend Jade, she mentioned a miracle stainless steel cleaner she’d just bought. To be clear—oso as to not slander Jade—there was no passive aggression in her comment—her line of sight and her train of thought were easy enough to piece together. I asked her for the link, and both the time stamp on my pre-hosting photo and product invoice confirm I bought it immediately on her recommendation.

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