Take your Jedi weapon. Use it.

The door­bell chimed, the dog barked and I went down the cor­ri­dor to open the door, where a man stood and said, “Ben­jamin Lee? Your shaver is here”.

So I screamed and ran and hid behind the sofa until he was gone, leav­ing a huge plas­tic bag con­tain­ing a box which con­tained a Braun Series 7 (790cc Type 5671) self-cleaning elec­tric shaver.

Then I remem­bered that a PR com­pany had writ­ten a month ago ask­ing if I would test drive Braun’s new self-cleaning elec­tric shaver, and that they would send me one if I said yes, and I had said yes. I think they knew that I wasn’t a fan of shav­ing, and that my unshaven look was borne of an aver­sion to shav­ing rather than any­thing to do with fashion.

I don’t have that much of a prob­lem with facial hair, like most Chi­nese men, and you can’t really call mine a five o’ clock shadow. It’s more like a April 2nd shadow, as that’s how slowly our facial hairs grow.

But the thought of not hav­ing to use shav­ing cream/gel and a man­ual razor was appeal­ing. Any­thing you need to plug in and recharge is appealing.

Hmm… won­der what’s inside?

Excited, I opened the box…

Removed the pam­phlet on top of the sty­ro­foam inner box…

And revealed the top of the sty­ro­foam inner box.

Then I took off the lid of the top of the sty­ro­foam inner box.

And I thought, “that’s a pretty big thing to bring up to your face”, before I calmed myself down and took apart the rest of the box and its contents.

There was this lit­tle can­is­ter of clear liq­uid with a “flam­ma­ble” warning.

Highly flam­ma­ble. So that’s why they want a blog­ger to test it

The shaver part of the whole kit was in it’s own plas­tic spec­ta­cle case, and open­ing it revealed a sleek sil­ver thing with but­tons and an LCD dis­play at the end.

Darth Vader had one of these, and he cut off Luke Skywalker’s hand with it 25 years ago, so this is not new technology.

Still, I read the instruc­tions very care­fully (any­thing with flam­ma­ble liq­uid in a plas­tic can­is­ter and a plug to put into an elec­tri­cal socket requires you to do so), and I’ve started charg­ing the thing to use later. It should charge in a short while I go find the rest of my Jedi outfit.