…is that it’s not durable enough.
I think that anyone who knows me is willing to agree that I’m rather hard on my personal possessions. Maybe I really am an agent of localized entropy; maybe I’m just careless. But things I own don’t tend to maintain a pristine state for very long at all. (And that’s something of a relief, really. If my alternative would be to care about keeping things shiny and new, and thus agonize over small dings, lost rubber feet, etc., then I think I’d take my life as it is, thanks.)
Now, there’s a lot of consumer goods where I think the manufacturers are perfectly justified in not going the extra distance (and spending/charging the extra cash) to make the things particularly heavy-duty. My television and my home stereo, for instance, are not items that I expect to stand up to constant entropic pressures. OTOH, something like a cellular phone — which is meant by nature to be carried around in a pocket or something all day — I expect a higher standard of ruggedness.
Which brings me to my bad luck with cellphones.
I am now on my third cellphone in three years. (For the two years prior to moving to the Midwest I’d had a single cellphone and was quite happy with it; unfortunately, the provider’s network didn’t extend to my new place of employment, and the next best option used a different broadcast network completely.) The first one began its descent into uselessness about a week after its first anniversary in my possession — in other words, right after its warranty expired. The pinnacle of its crapitude came when I was stuck in a horrible traffic jam on my way to a friend’s place in another state, and when I tried to call and say I’d be rather late, the green “send” button actually fell off the phone, and no amount of jamming it back into place would help.
The provider was subsequently so unhelpful that I proceeded to switch to another company, this one in a different country entirely. This time I got a better phone, in that it lasted about twenty months before showing signs of severe decrepitude. When it became clear that the thing was falling apart, I went into my local1 retailer and asked about a hardware upgrade. The trainee was very apologetic but told me there was nothing she could do (since I wasn’t eligible for a free upgrade until two years in my contract; what she meant was, there’s nothing inexpensive she could do); the random dude in from the regional office that day was rather less apologetic, and then tried to sell me synchronization software which he old me straight out that I would be able to use.
So by coincidence, when I was gadding about southern Ontario this weekend, I mentioned to a friend in passing that I needed a new phone. “I have your new phone,” he replied; what he actually meant was that he had his old phone — the kind of phone that’s built like you could go off to war with it, possibly as a weapon — which he wasn’t using anymore, but that had Nothing Wrong with it. A nominal fee later, and my account’s transfered to the Battle Axe. Yay!
It’s not perfect; the security code required to clear out the phone book is lost, and I’m having issues with call display (which I was having before, so that’s probably an account thing), and the charger seems a little persnickety. But it works — with better sound than my old-but-newer phone, as far as I can tell — and I’m not as worried about using it into the ground like I’ve done with the others, because (a) it’s already survived years plural of being carted around, (b) I’ll still be eligible for a free hardware upgrade in a couple of months’ time.
fn1: “Local” here meaning local to my phone number. It’s pretty far from being local to my apartment, but since I visit my cellphone’s area code & exchange fairly regularly, it works pretty well.