My desktop computer, 5 years old now, does not register its sound card (among other complaints common to five years of use).
My mobile phone’s battery falls out if shaken slightly, and requires extensive jiggling with the wire to even get it to charge.
My mp3 player turns itself on seemingly randomly, and so wears out the battery without me noticing (until I want to listen to something).
My gameboy’s backlight flickers.
My laptop also does not recognise it’s battery - if not plugged into the mains, it will not run. The CD drive is broken, and requires prising to open. And, for the last few days, it refused to run at all. The mouse I use with it also often turns itself off.
My CD player, which i’m having to use since everything else is broken, is now skipping. The “anti-skip” button makes it skip more.
Realising that all these problems were likely to come up soon, I decided to get a new computer (which should be able to solve at least some of those problems). That’s being taken care of, and I should have everything necessary in about a month. My various gadgets, hearing this, have clearly decided to make that last month as evil-filled as possible. Perhaps they are driven by envy. Perhaps they don’t want to share the surge protector. Nevertheless, they are* driving me insane*.
So curse you, technology! Your conspiracy may have thwarted me for the meantime, but I shall have my revenge!
Two years ago I bought a pair of Motorola cordless phones for the house. Perhaps I was confusing name-recognition for quality, because now I wish I hadn’t bought them.
Neither of them work properly now. Phone #1 has given up the ghost, and will not respond even to a new battery. Phone #2 decides when it will work, apparently based on how it feels. You can dial a call just fine, but it won’t let you hang up unless you press the button mutliple times very firmly.
We recently bought a new alarm clock, and it scares me. It Knows Too Much. When we plugged it in, it set itself to the correct time automatically. It learns what time to set the alarm for during the week, and it also decides when enough-is-enough in regards to the snooze bar. (You can only hit it so many times before the clock gives upon you and quits blaring.)
I’ve come to the conclusion that not only is technology sentient, its also evil and will do whatever it needs to in order to make your life hell. Last year, at the beginning of March, five days before a major observing proposal deadline, my desktop computer at the office dies. Completely and utterly screwed, won’t even turn on, and I have 3 proposals to write and submit. After a day of begging and pleading, I get our then tech support guy (who was a surly grumpy so and so) to move the hard drive to a different computer (although by this stage I was ready to take the damned thing home and install it on my home machine) so I can get some work done and submit the proposals.
This year, three days before the same observatory proposal deadline, my computer dies again. Apparantly a hard disk crash or something. Ah-ha! But, I have a cunning plan this time – I saved some of the work on networked drives and some on another system and some on my laptop! Fortunately, neither of those die.
I’m fairly sure my desktop computer at the office is exhibiting sentience. And people say I’m paranoid when I tell them I have 5 copies of my thesis, and have insisted on writing it all on the laptop.
I kind of really enjoy it when technology manifests personality. I used to have a coffee maker that was like this – you’d add a full pot of water and the appropriate number of scoops of coffee, turn it on and watch it emit bursts of steam, hissing and gurgling away for 20 minutes or so, then you’d wind up with just over one cup of potentially very strong coffee.
I found that hilarious.
I bought a Panasonic cordless phone, going on name-brand alone, and the thing’s a piece of crap. If you go more than 20 feet from the base, the call sputters in and out. You can’t go downstairs or you’ll lose your call. The battery never lasts very long - you have to just leave it i the charger.
We bought a new cordless phone a few months ago, an AT&T brand, and it’s great. I can go outside and check something in the garage (not unheard of with my husband - “Go read me the model number from the lawn mower.”) and never get static or lose the call. The battery lasts for days off the charger. It’s a wonderful phone.
Our alarm clock is like this - it set itself automatically when I plugged it in. This scared me a little bit. When the alarm goes off in the morning, and you hit the “OFF” button, it resets itself to go off again the next day at the same time. You don’t need to reset it every night - you just need to remember to actually turn it off on the weekends.
I got a new clock like that. Except that it’s fifteen minutes fast, and there’s no way (that I can find) to fix it. There’s no way to set the time, only the time-zone. The alarm is suitably annoying, but after three or four taps, it just shuts itself off. As a bonus, hitting the snooze alarm causes the display to show the time the alarm was set for. So, in the morning, you hit the snooze bar, look at it, think, “I’ve still got thirty minutes before I have to get up,” and go back to sleep. Then it goes off again, you hit the snooze bar, look at it, think “I’ve still got thirty minutes before I have to get up,” and go back to sleep. (Memory is not my strong suit early in the morning.) Plus, the display is lit by one of those blue LEDs, which is bright enough to read by, but the numbers can only be read if you look at it straight on, and my night stand is a little higher than my bed, so I can’t actually read the damn thing unless I pick it up and tilt it until its readable.
The “play all random” setting on my CD player plays three songs at random, then plays the rest of song 3’s CD tracks in sequential order. As an added bonus it scrolls through the other 5 CDs in the tray before landing back on the same CD and playing the next track, so you have a nice 10 second delay between tracks as it spins CDs through the tray before playing the next track from the same CD.
My answering machine suffered some sort of stroke after a power outage and now spews out erroneous information regardless of what you customize. I actually like it. “You have…twelve… new messages … end…of…messages…message…one…Saturday…three…fifty-five…AM…you have no messages…low…battery…”
I used to have a pocket calculator that had a drinking problem (splash!), and it decided that certain number buttons really were better in other ways, but only in some cases. The best part was that, while it didn’t do math properly, it still appear to behave deterministically, just strangely. We spent a while playing with it and determined that, as far as we could tell, it still did math with the following caveats:
[ul][li]#'s 1,2,4,5,8 would register as # + 2, when you pressed them as the first digit in any calculation[/li][li]- would subtract an additional 2.[/li][li]The 2nd, 4th, etc. digits in the lcd display were off by one (+1, -1, +1, -1…)[/ul][/li]
So, 2+3 = 7, 3+2 = 5 20+30 = 80, 8 + 1= 21, and 30 - 20 = 8.