The Painful Intimacy of Equipment Failure
One thing that pisses me off quickly is equipment failure under suspicion of cheap, cost-cutting, miserly evil. For example, I am flippantly certain that Dell cut too far and too deep during the manufacture of my Inspiron—so they pissed me off and their entire brand is now dead to me (although the jury is still out on Alienware). Maybe I’m a little old fashioned but I expect a computer’s major components—especially the display—to last for at least three years.
I expect a zipper to last for even longer. But my frickin’ almost-brand-new Performance Secolo II Jacket made me laugh when the zipper slider exploded under tension. After losing confidence in my computer (I’m not even going to get into the class-action lawsuit against the business I will never buy glasses from—or show my eyes to—ever again), my zipper exploding was just too much! All I needed then was a telemarketer to call me up—or maybe a collection agency, calling someone else they are “sure” is home—but never is—because I don’t know who they are! (And why do I have a filthy land line? …because AT&T forced it on me—in exchange for the “privilege” of using their private property for DSL!)
Clearly, it does not surprise me that Performance Bike is selling my jacket at 63% off. Maybe they have some chauvinistic sob story about someone from a “foreign country” tricking them into buying a few cases of defective zippers. But whoever is to blame, the ultimate blame starts in North America at about the time of the Civil War. According to John Taylor Gatto in “Outing School” (in the streaming audio track called “An Evil Kind of Excitement for a Managerial Utopia”), it was at this point on the historical timeline that “mankind” discovered how to automate and industrialize corruption.
What I have learned from my defective zipper is that there are zipper repair kits. After dealing with so-called “high-technology” failures, this actually made me smile.