Have you ever bought something, excitedly unpacked it when you get home only to discover that it has a ridiculous defect which prevents it from actually being useful?
I’m looking for (true) stories about problems with high-tech products – what kinds of problems annoy you most? Is there something you no longer use because the problems annoy you too much?
As an example, many years ago I bought a video machine. I got it home and discovered that the clock ran at exactly 1/30th of real time, ticking two minutes per hour. Clearly someone had installed the wrong crystal, but you try explaining that to the 18year-old at Currys, eventually I said “look, I’ll be back in half an hour, you tell me how many minutes its ticked by then”. This defect even defeated the mechanism intended to save the device from inaccurate crystals, since the time corrector was triggered based on the local clock rather than the over the air clock it synchd against, meaning that it syncd every few weeks, rather than daily as it was supposed to.
This machine was replaced (when I later returned and asked what the time was) with another video machine. The new one had another, more subtle, problem. This one had an out-the-box self tuning mechanism. Which was great, except it got the channels in the wrong order. Thats ok, I can deal with that. But the programming mechanism can’t – PDC is watching the wrong channel so the program start code never arrives. The new machine *never* records anything on timer.
It was shortly after this that I gave up with television.
Tell me your stories.
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