Since this blog is my dumping ground anyway, I suppose that it is a good a place as any to rant for a few paragraphs. Mostly I'm trying to prime the pump, as it has been for too long since I wrote anything of significance. The blog post ideas are starting to back-up again. Must write, or head will explode. That would be messy.
Rant. Right.
Living in a consumer-driven world has made us unforgiving, and raised our expectations to a level of impossible standards. Let me elaborate. A blogger I read (and enjoy) recently made a post about how his Xbox 360 died recently. However, he made a rather ungracious post about his experience, and what I felt was an unfair comparison of the new console to a bunch of older technology including DVD Players, VCRs, and the Atari 2600.
And this is the thing that makes me wave my hands in the air and scream in frustration. How can people even make these comparisons on reliability? The consumer mentality has us believing that everything new should be smaller, faster, quieter, better, sleeker, and 100% reliable. Everything must improve. There must be no sacrifice. If we get smaller, we can't get slower. If we get faster, we can't get hotter. If we get more impressive, we cannot fail. At all. Ever.
Bullshit.
As technology "improves" there has to be some sacrifice somewhere. Something has to give. As things get smaller, they get harder to put together. As things get faster, they get hotter. As things get better looking they get weaker. As things get more complicated, they become more prone to failure. These are unavoidable consequences of improvement. Once the initial improvement has been made, we can then work out the issues in later revisions. That is what revisions are for.
I think this all boils down to people not understanding that testing for failure is an imprecise and impossible task. Yes, impossible. There is no way to test for everything. You cannot test chaos. You cannot test unknowns. You can test everything you can think of, but you will never think of everything. You want examples?
Can structural engineers test for every possible weather condition on a building to ensure that weather will never compromise the structure? No. We can test theoretical models to ensure that it will survive realistic extremes. We can test scale models under reproducible conditions. But cannot build the thing, then test everything. And we can certainly miss a lot of tests on the way. Does that stop us from building magnificent and death-defying architecture? Not likely.
How about medicine? Watch an episode of House. While the show is obviously dramatic, highly inaccurate when it comes to the administration of medicine, and wildly into hyperbole, it does illustrate one thing: you can't predict everything. Only after everything normal has been attempted, tested, and eliminated do you find the one thing that was missed. The one overlooked, ignored, or unlikely combination that results in the rare condition.
So what do you do when you get a lemon? Do you complain because you are the unfortunate recipient of small percentage of failures? What if the failures aren't so small? Your outrage at the failure of a consumer product to live up to your expectations does nothing at all. You are yelling into the wind at best, spooking other consumers and creating a problem for the manufacturer at the worst. Chances are that they know about the problem. The first time something goes wrong there is some unlucky person who has to figure out why. And then figure out how bad the problem really is. And how much it's going to take to fix it. Sometimes it's cheaper to ignore the failure because it can't be fixed without crippling the business.
Just pray that person isn't you. And cut them some slack, they're only human.
