Ian’s Rules of Digital Fail
- The more digital stuff you own the more you have that can fail.
- The more stuff, the more of your time you will be spending trying to resolve customer care problems and fix failures.
- You own too much digital stuff if you have no time left to have a digital life, due to the time spent fixing things.
- 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.
- The last failure you had is no guide to the next failure. Never fight the last failure, always be prepared for new ones.
- 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.
- The more devices you own the more variery of failures you will enjoy.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
So it sounds like you need more devices to survive failure, but on the downside you’ll spend more time dealing with them all failing?
I’m currently trying to work out which update broke ability to play Half-Life 2. The steam forums suggest it’s a 64-bit mode bug, which I’m going to try disabling tonight.
Michael Stevens
November 18, 2008 at 10:49 am
Yes, that about sums it up.
I’m thinking about a follow-up post specifically about the pros and cons of online services, cloud stuff, etc.
Benefits to help with surviving failures vs providing more things to go wrong.
Ian Fogg
November 19, 2008 at 5:53 pm
That could be an interesting post.
I particularly find myself thinking about the ease-of-use of online services vs what can go wrong, both in terms of security and reliability.
For example the recent fuss on a number of blogs about people who have their entire life on google, get randomly locked out of their account for “abuse”, and find google’s customer services to get that sorted out are somewhat lacking.
Michael Stevens
November 19, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Analogy might be the auto industry, where reliability was brought to the top of the agenda by the Japanese companies who copied, then improved, European and US technology. For many digital devices to become mainstream companies need to focus on this reliability and simplicity as the core of a great user experience. Like you, I have learnt to have low expectations for most tech devices. In straitened times, that’s not sustainable.
Nick Thomas
November 20, 2008 at 5:57 pm