Have you noticed that the craftsmanship of things that we use every day is not up to the standards set years ago?
We seem to be right in the middle of a "junk culture" revolution now. Everything we buy is doomed to failure at some point. It's like the say about baseball: "managers are hired to be fired." With the things we purchase, you can adapt that saying to "everything we use is bought to fall apart."
My wife bought me one of those small, digital cameras several months ago. It did everything I wanted it to do: it took digital movies, it took digital photos and it recorded sound. I only had the thing for less than six months when it broke on me during a baseball game my son and I attended this past Friday. I tried to get it working, but it was fruitless.
My son has Rock Band. He has had it for less than a year. He and his cousins were playing it this weekend. One cousin hit the drums, and one of the drums collapsed. I tried to fix it with duct tape, but to no avail.
Do you ever fix your TV, video recording unit, your camera anymore? Once things break, we trash them and buy new ones. I think this started with video recorders, where in the 1990s it started to cost more to fix them than buy a new one, so we just trashed them.
I remember the days when things lasted a long time, even with daily use; certainly, televisions fall into that category. A TV would last a generation, and if there happened to be any problems, you would call the TV man, he would come to your house, and he would fix it.
Today, computers are one of the biggest culprits. We use them every day, but I have found that after about four to five years of use, they pretty much die.
Cars also fall into that category. Once a car reaches its five-year birthday, it is pretty much all down hill.
I wish we could just trash this junk culture and get back to the time when things were made to last.
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