[Isaac Zachary]

There have been lots of great improvements in reliability and longevity, in some aspects. But then there's the frustration of stuff that doesn't work no matter how hard you try.

Like I said in a couple of other posts, I have some friends who bought a car, a 2017 car for a lot of money. Well, the transmission is dead and it needs another one and it's not going to be cheap to fix either. So what now? The car has less than 100,000 miles on it. Do they put another, potentially, $6,000 into it. They had it towed to a dealer. They could try towing it to other places and shop around but their tow insurance allows for only 3 tows per year and they've already used up two of them.

I decided to build a computer as the old one, from 2011, was having some USB and freezing issues. I did a real simple computer without an accessories or graphics card. Just a new Motherboard, PSU, CPU, a M.2 Drive, and only one stick of RAM. Well, the thing would keep freezing and freezing to the point I couldn't even install Windows. So I replaced the Motherboard, the PSU, and tried 3 different drives and finally replaced the CPU. Troubleshooting took me 2 months! After that it seemed to work fine until today, only 3 weeks later, it now won't recognize the M.2 drive. Mind you I both used only parts off of the Motherboard's qualified vedors list and I even splurged and got a fancy Samsung Evo M.2 drive, which was on the QVL. But nope, I'm still battling with and will once again have to start returning parts for new ones.

At work we used to get Winsor equipment and never had any problem with them, until Kartcher Group bought them out. Now every single last piece of equipmet we get has a problem and needs to be sent back. And the time to get a replacement or get it fixed under waranty sometimes takes months. We got a whole pallet of fans, of supposedly high quality, and every last one of them does not work!

Even my own cars have problems that I just don't understand. The Avalon's infotainment center is buggy and does not work correctly. I know it's a minor problem, but it's already been fixed at a dealer. I hate that I can't get the ice and snow pack off from around the wheel wells in the Avalon as the rear wheel wells are made from some sort of fabric or fiberous material on this car. I can't even change my own brake fluid in the thing and I'm fed up with mechanics around here.

And don't get me started on problems I've had with cellphones!

Sometimes I feel like giving up on technology. It seems like it doesn't matter if something costs a huge percent of my paycheck and is brand new and highly rated, it will just stop working and then I have to call and get the waranty going and several months later get it back only to discover it still has the problem.