The Error Box

The monitor made the ominous whooping noise of an unexpected shutdown and went black.  I jabbed the power button on the CPU.  A string of white characters appeared on the screen.  For the past month my computer had been speaking to me in tongues, displaying random streams of symbols before starting up.  Today, however, the screen went black again.  I deployed my fix-all technique of whacking the computer.  Nothing happened.  Panic set in.  I pictured all my data being sucked into the black hole in the middle of the monitor into which my screen had flown.  A phone call and three visits from a computer professional later, I realized that both the paper I had been writing and my computer were gone.

Worse than losing my hard drive, though, was the computer expert’s reaction to its demise.  “How old’s your computer? Four years? That’s about right.”

About right? Her expression told me my indignation reflected my naiveté.  I had not bought my computer with the expectation that it would break.  Apparently I was the only one.  But in the two years since my hard drive’s abrupt end, I have come to accept it as inevitable that computers will commit seppuku at critical moments.  Unable to function optimally, stripped of privacy and dignity by spyware, the computer cuts its losses and exits from its mechanical coil.  But not before taking valuable information with it.  Within five years of your purchasing it, your computer is defunct. 

The computer expert made only a perfunctory attempt at resuscitating my computer.  She had come merely to break the news to me.  Rather than fixing our computers, at the smallest sign of significant trouble, we abandon them and purchase new ones. 

It is the same way with many commodities.  Radios, for example.  My father, a man stubbornly rooted in the New England tradition of wearing clothes until they rot of his body and using electronics until they are old enough to be considered retro (“But it still works fine!”), was shocked to discover that no one would repair his radio.  The radio had been built to last, through wear, tear and seemingly nuclear warfare.  My father recounts the tale with a sense of wonder, that the man at the electronics repair store told him it would cost more to repair the radio than to buy a new one.  The idea of fixing something is increasingly novel. 

Our products are built to be replaced.  This fact means increasingly short expiration dates.  Even those products that still function well have a limited period of use. The average printer, for example, has a life expectancy of one year.  Not because that is when it stops working, but because that is when the ink cartridges run out.  For many cheap printers, the cartridges are expensive enough that simply purchasing a new printer with included ink cartridges is more cost effective.  The same is true of some razors; the box of new blades is more expensive than the razor, so people simply buy a new razor.

At the time of my computer’s untimely departure, I was no stranger to reconciling myself to poor quality goods and services.  I grew up in the city that seems to have invented the shrug.  Washington, D.C. was one of the worst run cities in America during the 1990s.  Within two years of settling in the city, my parents grew accustomed to the idea that some weeks, the garbage men would leave our garbage to rot on the sidewalk.  It was unsurprising to us that pizza came faster than ambulances.  No part of the city, whatever class of neighborhood, was exempt.  The natives of the city simply shrug and flash the weary smile of the long suffering.  Our attitude towards public services can be described in one phrase: “Oh well.”

One month, we watched our block’s garbage pile up for three weeks.  It was the latest part of a strong tradition to let trash pile up; in 1400, garbage piled up so high in front of Paris gates that it interfered with the city’s defenses.  Only then did officials admit to a waste issue.  Similarly, only when the juicy, rotting garbage piles on the sidewalk interfered with access to the street did someone grow desperate enough to call and demand service.  At the end of the experience, no one suggested that there was something unusual or wrong about being taxed for a service we did not receive.

My computer would never have shrugged and let such poor service stand.  Before viruses weakened it, my computer always demanded good service.  In the computing world, Microsoft Word was my D.C. garbage man, finicky and prone to withholding service.  During my constant fights with Word, which often ended in the program quitting without warning, my computer always stepped up.  It would immediately send me a text box, “Microsoft Word closed unexpectedly.  Would you like to report this error?”  It was the sort of prompt response that comes from a single-minded expectation of service.  My computer was persistent in its demands until the week before we parted.

The lowering of expectation in humans is a more gradual process.  Within a few years of a new product or service being introduced, we expect the quality to decrease.  Righteous indignation fades quickly into quiescence.  It is simply easier to accept poor quality than fight for high quality, and we are not programmed to keep fighting.  In D.C., we made small, occasional concessions for convenience’s sake, but then came to accept them as commonplace.  My computer’s failure to send me error text boxes was due to sickness; our failure to demand high quality, sustained services and products is due to laziness.

I was in deep shock when I lost my computer.  I had the settings just right and my favorite games loaded.  The computer even greeted me at the start up with Humphrey Bogart’s voice saying, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”  It had never occurred to me that our relationship would be so fleeting.  The idea of having to construct another Rick Blaine was daunting.  

But after giving him up the first time, it was easier.  I came to believe that throwing out something almost as soon as I bought it was cool.  It was just as well I had to throw my computer out.  After all, the next one would have better interface, new programs, and maybe pump my gas.  Who knew? Personal computers seemed increasingly built to do almost anything (for about three years).  It was my right, my duty to experience the new technology and to make more garbage more quickly

In 1996, my family had owned the same computer for five years.  We purchased a new one because we wanted a new computer.  Eight years later, my highly advanced, shiny computer was falling apart after three years of use.  In the time between, computers developed a threshold of three or four years before shutting down permanently.  What initially horrified me almost instantly became a fact of life. Our almost instantaneous acceptance of accelerated product death is perhaps best expressed in the words of Billy Joe Armstrong, “A guy walks up to me and asks 'What's punk?' So I kick over a garbage can and say 'That's punk!' So he kicks over a garbage can and says 'That's punk?' and I say 'No that's trend’!”  There is a quick descent after the error box fails to show up for the first time.

technorati tags:planned, obsolescence, computers