I dislike this frying pan.

It’s probably no worse than any of the Teflon pans we have in our kitchen. I hate it because it’s supposed to make Teflon seem like cookware from the Stone Age and it doesn’t. You may have seen it advertised on TV. It’s shilled by a guy with the most delightful British accent. The apex of his pitch is, “It’s lit’rally like cooking on air!”

People misusing the word literally, or even lit’rally, is a pet peeve of mine. Most often, people using the word literally at all is a pet peeve of mine. Yet I was so enticed by the idea of cooking my eggs on air, I let this one slide. Let that be a lesson to me.

I’ll tell you what this frying pan is lit’rally like, if you can forgive me for putting the disqualifying word like after the oft-abused literally.

It’s lit’rally like cooking with any other pan in your cupboard, except the instructions say not to use cooking spray, which makes it lit’rally like having your eggs stick to the bottom. This makes it lit’rally like cooking scrambled eggs instead of the omelet you intended.

It lit’rally makes you shout out words you’ve always been good about not saying in front of the children. (This is the only accurate use of the word lit’rally I’ve written today.)

We did not buy this from the TV commercial. We’ve never bought anything that way. These things end up in the “As Seen on TV” sections of stores, and then they go on sale, and even though nothing else “As Seen on TV” has ever worked like it did when seen on TV you think somehow this one might be the one that does. Because figuratively like cooking on air is, technologically speaking, the closest thing to literally cooking on air, right?

“And I’ve lost the receipt!”

I’m going to be honest and admit this is not the first time I’ve been made a sucker by a product As Seen on TV. There is a NuWave oven that’s been sitting in our closet for the better part of a decade, since the time it taught us to appreciate our regular old oven.

Sometimes infomercial products intrigue me. Air fryers are the latest device I wish I could believe. They are supposed to use hot air to cook chicken wings, onion rings, French fries, and all the other things God made it smelly and inconvenient to deep fry at home so humans might live past middle age. A crispy chicken wing cooked without oil would be the dawn of a new era of hope and joy for me. But I will not be bamboozled by my lofty dreams again. I believe it is Newton’s Fifth Law of Physics that states a warm breeze will never make chicken crispy.

No, I’ve finally learned my lesson. No air fryer for me, because that would be literally like getting ripped off for a hundred bucks, which is lit’rally like £78.