Someday, very soon, so we are told, we’ll have an amazing home that makes our lives so much easier. We’ll come back after a hard day’s work and the door will open on its own and the house will say, “Welcome home…[insert your name here]” A cold drink will be waiting for you. We’re told that it’s going to be wonderful when the furnace says, “Time to change my filter!” Or the toaster-oven says, “Your sixteen-year-old son tried to cook a pizza and set me on fire.” Or the fridge says, “Don’t eat that! It’s been in me for two weeks!”

 

But there’s a sinister trend that programmers and manufacturers are hiding and we, the consumer, are ignoring; these devices, just like the rest of our smart machines, need a lot of attention.

 

Already, in my family, we have so many smart devices that one of them is always broken or at least partially broken. Right now, it’s my desktop’s Internet browser, which every two days or so locks up and forces me to do a full system reboot. When this first happened, I spent a precious half-hour on-line with the vendor and was told how to fix it—power down, unplug, spin three times around in my chair, plug it back in, power up and bingo! It will work! And it did… for about two days. So now, because I don’t have the time, and because, frankly, it depresses me to think that I have to fart around with this thing when I could be doing something fun, I just reboot it and hope that the problem won’t get worse and that the next upgrade will fix what the previous upgrade broke.

 

I’m an electrical engineer so you’d think when these machines stop working, I’d go all geeky and jump for joy but actually I don’t. In fact, I’m really unhappy because I regard these devices as tools and I expect my tools to work… always—not just when they feel like it. If you were a carpenter and every once in a while, when you picked up the hammer, the head was missing or you swung it and the head went zipping through a window, you wouldn’t be very happy. I actually dread hearing from one of my family the words, “My gizmo isn’t working!” or “The what-do-you-call-um running on the thing-a-jig is going bootsy-doodle!” It’s occurring almost every day. I’m no longer a father; I’m an IT repairman who happens to go by the name of “Dad.” My wife now says, “If you really love me, you’ll fix the PC/MAC/Phone/Smart TV/Tablet/Wireless router/Printer/Smart Watch/Surround sound.” Or she gives me a nibble on the ear and a wink and hands me her laptop.

 

I blame Bill Gates for this; he was the first person to push out software that didn’t fully function. He realized that the consumer would put up with an amazing amount of crap. For some reason, we are willing to accept devices that, some of the time, only partially work and once in a while, stop working entirely. He realized that we would expend our own hard-won money and/or spare time fixing it. I’m not sure why this is. Does it satisfy some hidden masochistic need in the human psyche? It certainly it seems that way.

 

Now this is all somewhat amusing when it doesn’t involve you and you’re not in the middle of a disaster with five minutes to get a report out and the printer is no longer working—even when you scream and threaten the thing’s life. Then it’s not funny, especially when deep down you have this weird feeling that the smug machine knows, thanks to all the stress, it’s actually your life that’s just lost a year.

 

So, are we willing to let another dozen or more devices, all connected to the Internet, into our home? Do we believe that these machines will work better than all the rest of them?

 

Of course not.

 

Every one of them is going to break on a regular basis. Every one of them is going to need a software upgrade on a regular basis, every one of them has to be configured, every one of them is going to need a secure password that you won’t be able to remember. If any of them have microphones, “you-know-who” is going to be listening in.

 

So, before you drink the Kool-Aid and put your life in Hal’s hands (2001, a space odyssey), weigh the benefits against the drawbacks and… buy the “dumb” device that, oddly enough, works every time.

 

 

All the best,

 

PG.