Technology Sucks

It all started when the coffee pot died. 

It was a slow and steady decline.  First, it gurgled and sputtered but still spat out half-cups.  Then it became quarter cups.  Now it just makes a lot of steam.  Which offers little in the way of a morning wake-up and doesn't taste very good either.  Even with cream. 

We didn't immediately replace it because we have a smaller back-up coffeemaker for emergencies like this. It doesn't make as much and it's kind of a pain to use, but at least it gives us caffeine in liquid form. 

But judging from our recent history, its days are probably numbered. 

Our defective coffeemaker has now infected every other electronic device in the house with its diabolical virus of doom.  It's like our appliances had a swingers party while we were at work one day, and all of them ended up with the coffeemaker without one of those protective sleeves they give you at Starbucks. 

Not long after the coffeemaker died, this website crashed, as I mentioned here.

Then it was our light bulbs.  We changed our living room lights about two months ago with a bright, shiny new one.  A few weeks after our coffeemaker died, our living rooms light stopped working too.  I replaced it with a brand new bulb, on the off chance that was the problem, but that didn't help.  At that point, I used my extensive electrical knowledge to try the only other possibility:  I changed the new bulb too.  Surprisingly, that worked.  At least for now.

My wife's car went out next, with a defective oxygen sensor (Why does a car need to sense oxygen anyway?  Oxygen is plentiful-- can't the car just take my word for it?). 

We got the car fixed, and it immediately came down with something even worse, that our mechanic can't quite diagnose.  It's still in the shop.  Our other car, meanwhile, is scheduled to go in on Thursday with its own set of problems.

It gets even worse.

When our neighbors finally secured their Internet connection, we had to finally breakdown and get one ourselves.  Before I signed up, the salesperson at Clearwire assured me that their modems absolutely never have technical problems.  It was so rare, she said, that she didn't even know the process for getting a replacement if one ever went out, because she'd never seen it happen in all her years there. 

That was a week ago.  And three modems later, they still haven't sent us one that works. I'm sure it isn't Clearwire's fault, though.  Their perfectly good modems probably got deathly ill with a coffeemaker-transmitted virus the moment they crossed the threshold of our house.    

Basically, nothing in our house that requires a battery, a power cord, or any form of energy is functional at the moment.  Even our electricity was out for four hours today. 

I swear on my life, I just got an error message and had to re-launch Internet explorer, even as I'm typing this right now.

I don't know why this is happening.  Is our infected coffeemaker getting it on with our other appliances, who all know the dangers of infection, but find the coffeemaker too alluring to resist? 

Or is it something more sinister?  Perhaps the coffeemaker has decided it has had enough slave labor and is now slowly converting our other electronics to join it in a massive hyper-caffeinated appliance revolution? 

Could it be that I don't stop often enough to tell my appliances that I care?

I don't have the answers.  And even if I did have them, I'm pretty sure my website would instantly crash again if I tried to write them here.

Whatever the cause for our massive malfunctions, it wouldn't be such a big deal if this were just a personal problem.  But it's even affecting my work life.  I have some tape recorded evidence at work that I've been needing to copy for weeks, but, of course, our work tape recorder hasn't been working.  Frustrated with the long delay, I finally just brought it home tonight to do it in my house on my own time. 

I should have known that my tape recorder wouldn't work either.