Ever had a watch that just stopped working?  Sure, the battery goes dead, you go buy a new one, and presto, it works again.  Or you shove it in a drawer until you feel like buying a new one and end up getting a new watch instead.

My mom had this watch awhile back, a Garfield watch, with his arms as the hands.  And it stopped working.  And she shoved it in a drawer.

She was hardcore broken up about that watch, let me tell you.  She’s a rabid fan of that fat cat.  So she swore she’d get out and buy a new battery, but you know how it goes.  She never did.

Then one day she was looking through the drawer, and she notices the watch is ticking.  It’s working.  Perfectly fine.  So she takes it out and puts it on.

A few days later it stops again.  Dead.

She shoves it back in the drawer.

A couple days later she checks it again.  Working.

She puts it back on.  A day goes by.  It stops.

You see where I’m going with this…

Watch batteries don’t recharge themselves, at least not normally, do they?  What about this watch made it so cranky?  So temperamental?  Was it just taking after the cat on its face?  Who knows… All I can say is, technology sucks.

(This was written originally in 2001, the watch worked off and on until Feb 2007… yup.. was cranky for a LOT of years… damn cat)

This is a phone.

Simple.  Easy to use.

Push some buttons, call goes through, people you need to talk to answer.

That is, if technology didn’t suck.

I had a phone, not the one pictured above, but one fairly similar to it, and one day it decided it didn’t like me any more.  That’s right, that’s what I said, it didn’t like me any more.  And it liked the rest of my family fine, it liked guests and strangers fine, it just didn’t much care for me.  So to show me how much it didn’t care for me, it started playing tricks on me.

Tell me again how to use a phone… Push buttons, the call goes through, people you need to talk to answer.  Simple.  Easy to use.  This is a phone.  Until the buttons stop doing what they’re told.

I called a number one day, I was calling the local TV station, and the call went through, and someone picked up.  Hello, they said, which was odd since I was calling a business, not a home.  Usually businesses answer with their names.  So I asked if this was News 10 NBC, and the person said I had the wrong number.

Oops.

So I dialed again, and I got a different person.  And they also said hello.  So I asked if they were who I was looking for, and they said no, I had the wrong number.

Hmm.

So I dialed again very slowly, checking each number as it went in.  And someone new, a third person answered.  And they also said hello.  And I asked if they were the right number, and they said no, they weren’t.

I had someone else dial for me, and the call went through perfectly fine.

And that miffed me off a bit.

Eventually I worked out that every time I dialed *four* the phone dialed something else entirely.  I don’t know what, a random number, and only when it was me.  So I worked around it, and the phone got pissed.  Then the six stopped working, and later the five, but still only when the dialer was me.

I have a new phone now, and it’s perfectly fine.  But I always make sure I’m nice to it.  Cause if you piss off your phone, it can be a real pain in the finkster.

Technology has become the basis of our civilization.  Computers, cell phones, copiers and the like are no longer optional, they’re mandatory.  Someone asked me the other day where she could fax something to me.  Not if.  Where.  If you’re planning on going anywhere in your life, technology is coming along for the ride.

But technology didn’t begin with the Atari and Commodore 64.  Computers and video games are high-technology, the pinnacle of the field, but we tend to think of them as the entire field.  We forget about electricity, cars, refrigerators, indoor plumbing, all the things that really are civilization as we know it.  That’s all technology, too.

What’s my point?  Technology is life.

Life sucks.

The problem with technology is you need a degree to understand how it works.  You can turn things on, use them, maybe even fix minor glitches.  But to really understand them, you have to be trained, and even then they’ll still manage to fool you.

The things technology does can’t be explained.  I stopped trying a really long time ago.  Computers break down for absolutely no reason, then come back on of their own free will.  Refrigerators stop refrigerating, automobiles stop mobilizing, lights stop lighting, and nobody can figure out why.  We don’t try.  If worse comes to worse, we get ourselves a new one.

Technology sucks.  This is the place to tell us all why.  What’s your car done to you that you just can’t figure out?  What appliances do you have that only work when they feel like it?  What does your television do if you turn it on too fast?  All these things are stories I want to hear.

Technology will always suck.  We may as well get a laugh out of it.