if connected

1. The more digital stuff you own the more you have that can fail.
2. The more stuff, the more of your time you will be spending trying to resolve customer care problems and fix failures.
3. You own too much digital stuff if you have no time left to have a digital life, due to the time spent fixing things.
4. Warranties, backups and insurance will not give you back the time you wasted trying to talk, or talking with, customer care or restoring your backup.
5. The last failure you had is no guide to the next failure. Never fight the last failure, always be prepared for new ones.
6. The more mobile phones and broadband connections you have the better. One working connection is all you need to be happy, and to contact customer care about the others.
7. The more devices you own the more variery of failures you will enjoy.
8. More devices does not mean you will have a suitable replacement device when one fails. You will discover that all devices are unique in some subtle way that will only become clear when you need that device to stand in for one that has failed.
9. Price and brand are no guide to how likely something digital is to fail. Everyone uses the same underlying components now, often it’s these that are the root of fail.
10. Murphy will play rock, scissor, paper with your digital stuff’s weaknesses: Drop proof items will never be dropped, water resistant ones will never have water spilt on them, and surge protected items will never encounter a power cut.

This post was prompted tonight by a failure of my home broadband, but I’ve had so many fails over the last few years that these rules have been a very long time cooking.

Everything you need to stay connected requires power. Having to keep things charged is a major pain. There’s the annoyance and worry of having to keep an eye on the power meter. There’s the hassle of carrying chargers, and, of course, every different phone, mp3 player, laptop, camera, whatever, needs a different and incompatible charger. So, that means carrying a different charger for each gadget. It’s a mess.

This is the holy grail: “No idea. I can’t remember when I charged it, was days ago…” which was a friend’s reply to me earlier today about his latest toy. Guess the gadget.