My dental hygienist has been hectoring me for years to buy an electro-mechanical toothbrush. She promised better dental health overall and fewer sessions with the drill. Still, I resisted the honey being poured into my ears. Mostly I resisted what I considered an extravagant expense in replacing a simple $2 toothbrush (that the dentist use to give me for free every six months), with a several hundred dollar battery powered model that also required regular brush head replacement. Frankly, I assumed the mechanical toothbrush would last about as long in my household as the electric razor I tried and promptly threw away twenty years ago.

After not a little bit of consideration I bit the bullet and ordered up one of these sonic cleaning marvels that was on offer as part of Amazon’s big site-wide yard sale. I’m trying to be open minded, though the fact that I just spent $100 on a toothbrush still feels like something of a patently ridiculous expense.

I’m going to do my best to give this thing the benefit of the doubt. It’s got until the first scheduled brush replacement to show me its worth. If it proves to be a case of a fool and his money, I’ll be perfectly happy to go back to ordering 10 packs of old school toothbrushes from Amazon for $5. Or maybe I’ll just knock out all of these awful teeth with a ball-peen hammer and get titanium chompers. At this point I’m starting to think that’s also a perfectly reasonable long-term solution.