Lets face it, it used to be that when you wanted to check your mail, you go to your mailbox in front of your house/apartment complex, setting your alarm clock was as simple as turning a dial, and getting a console game to work literally involved one labored breath.

Today, however, is a whole new set of problems.

Our mailing systems, whether it is SMS, email, IM, IRC, or whatever, can, have, and will again, crash. Changing the time on even a run of the mill DVD player requires a gauntlet of menu digging. Console games now must be coddled, cared for, and meticulously cleaned for just to merely be played. Quite frankly, I never heard of mail boxes crashing (not by themselves anyways), never complained about the menu system in the alarm clock, and a scratch on your game was merely a visual flaw.

Part of the problem comes from the near infinite environments, conditions, and actions that can be imparted on a piece of circuitry, another part from the trade-offs in physical resilience for increased performance and style, and the rest from the guys who made the dammed things.

The XBOX 360′s spate of catastrophic system failures come from overheating due to poor circulation: the result of the ever-lasting war between engineers and artists, where the artists wanted sleek curves that made it nigh impossible to properly circulate air inside the system. The same struggle has brought about hollow plastic bumpers on cars for the sole purpose of being able to paint the entire car a single color.

Operating system software goes through so many different kinds of modifications by so many different kinds of people in wildly varied orders at different points in its life-cycle in almost any environment you can think of that it is inevitable that something will go wrong and it will be annoying. The same could be said of the fashion world: something will be popular and it will be absolutely nonsensical and hideous, and there will be no respite from it. Think Uggs and Crocs, both are stupid, ugly, and totally useless in design, especially Uggs and the mind-boggling lack of any sort of water-proofing.

Now the big reason why I am loosing hair over technology: its all interconnected behind a big black screen. When something goes wrong, it does so without giving you any sort of meaningful hint as to whose fault it was. Usually with mechanical systems, with the use of sounds, sights, smells, and fluids, the problem can easily be pin-pointed and fixed. Electronic systems at best can give you pages of text, but usually nothing at all. Once I had to hook up a sound system that involved two turntables, a 2 channel mixer, a 4 channel mixer, 2 microphones, and 2 speakers. For some reason, the high and mid range of the sounds were cut out. Through a process of elimination, I narrowed it down to one of the mixers, the speakers, and the cables that connect the two, and that was as far as I was able to go.

Unfortunately, I feel as if we are rushing into an age where everything overheats, as brittle as a sheet of dried crepe paper, and as intuitive as an aerodynamic textbook in Korean. All for the name of fancy crap.