RIP Benq 17" monitor (2004-2008).
A couple of months ago, my wife's laptop keyboard threw its u...just like an old typewriter. The keycap was adhered back into place, but the connection was dodgy and the key wobbled a bit. She soldiered on with the thing for eight weeks, trying mightily (the way I am right now) to avoid typing that vowel. Eventually (like I just did), she succumbed.
RIP Toshiba laptop (2007-2008).
For a while, a couple of years back, we had two coffee makers in our kitchen sitting cheek by jowl: a black one for regular morning java and a white one for decaf. That was before we'd taken on enough coffee to understand there's no sane place in the world for decaffeinated coffee; when that realization dawned, we put the cheap white coffeemaker in storage and stuck with the midline black one for our morning bean juice.
I like my coffee the same way I like my showers: piping hot, just this side of tongue-charring. My wife prefers hers at what she calls a 'reasonable' temperature and I call 'tepid bordering on...hey, why not have an iced capp?'
So it was a sudden mixed blessing one day about six weeks ago when Eva found she could drink the coffee right after it finished brewing and I found I could barely stomach the stuff. Inspection showed marked wear on the enamel plate.
RIP Oster coffee-maker (2006-2008)
Out came the cheapie model. Lo and behold, the exact same wear pattern is starting to show on its enamel plate. It's only a matter of time, and not very much time at that, before it starts serving lukewarm coffee.
This is but a small sampling of the litany of products, some of them high end and supposedly just reeking of quality, that have gone kablooey on us over the past ten years or so, well before what I would think of as their time.
Now admittedly, I seem to harbour unrealistic expectations about the durability of any given product, especially if said product is expensive. The way I look at it, if you're going to spend twenty thousand (never mind forty, or sixty) on a car, that car ought to--with proper care-- last fifteen years minimum. Laptop keyboards shouldn't be falling apart barely a year after they're made. And even the lowly coffee-maker ought to be able to make coffee for a couple of years.
I'm a throwback, and I know it. I search, usually in vain, for real quality items. I'd rather pay a high price for something, knowing it'll last, then buy cheap and have to replace the item two or three times over what's supposed to be its life cycle.
I'm a relic of another time when durability was the hallmark of quality. Nowadays, durability is so...obsolete. Durability seems to be the last thing most people in this NOW!-obsessed, instant gratification culture care about. What use the old when you can have the new?
And yes, I know, I'm lucky to have any of this stuff when so much of the world can only dream of laptops and coffee-makers and what-all. I think that actually pisses me off more. Planned obsolesence is ethically wrong, no matter how you spin it. I've heard people say that stuff has to fail, so that we can keep spending money, keep people employed, keep the economy going, keep the "terrists" from winning.
Bullshit.
Just think, if manufactured products weren't so damned fragile, we could--sounds Communist, I know--share them. Spread them out a little. Let's face it, do you really need sole possession of a lawnmower, when it mostly sits there doing nothing all the time? Hell, one lawnmower, made properly, would suffice for an entire neighbourhood. Split the cost, even an elevated cost for a properly-made lawnmower, among a hundred households and it becomes trivially cheap. Ditto snowblowers. I'm sure, with thought, you can take this concept and run with it, all the way up to and including cars. That would take a good deal more forethought and organization, not to mention a few paradigm shifts, but it could work: already we find car co-ops in major cities.
And people could still keep their jobs. Instead of turning out endless doomed-to-fail crap for folks afflicted with affluenza, we could see streams of quality-made goods for everyone.
Just a thought as we slog through the Christmas season. I've never heard the Voice of the Retailer quite so shrill as I have this season. Buy or die, they almost seem to be screaming. Buy or die.
..................................................
What do you want for Christmas?
I've always hated that question...at least since I discovered Santa was really parents. Once the asker becomes a real, close person, the answerer has an obligation to consider his answer carefully. How much does it cost? Is it easily found? And so on. For a while it got easier as what I wanted morphed into what I needed sometime in my teens....the same clothing that would have made me icily polite as a kid made me ecstatic as I grew up.
Now, there's very little I need, and so it's hard to answer that question again. That said, I'm finally beginning to appreciate Eva's approach to the Christmas season. She presents a list of things she wants, and then I'm supposed to--get this--buy things from that list.
For years, I couldn't believe it was really that simple. She must mean that list as a very loose guideline, I thought. Where's the fun in knowing exactly what's coming Christmas morning? How anticlimactic is that? Hell, I don't even have the opportunity to demonstrate my love for and deep knowledge of her by presenting her with something she didn't even know she wanted until that inst...
Yeah. That's stupid. And yet surprisingly hard to vanquish.
It'd be easier if the budget allowed me to spend, say, a thousand bucks. Then I could impress her! That same thought ricochets through my head every year, and every year I bitch-slap it into submission, because I know Christmas isn't about impressing people, and even if it is, impressing people isn't about spending vast sums of money. Our budget for gifting each other is kept deliberately small. We do tend to buy one sort-of extravagant thing for the house every year around this time. This year it's two things: a new monitor for me and a new laptop for her--neither of which was a need we (ahem) expected to have...
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