Ghosts (or just bugs) in the machine

Why can’t [new] technology just work?

Take my Series 60 phone, for example. When it was new, it worked mostly fine. Then slowly over time I’ve been getting weird errors that are not critical but just annoying. And it’s not even about installing software; I haven’t installed anything new for months. It is just sort of degenerating. Examples:

• The sound in the boot-up animation works properly perhaps once in every 30 boots. Thus the phone reminds me of its imperfections every time I turn it on. Nice.
• Sometimes the personalized ringtones I’ve set for some people work. Sometimes they don’t.
• The phone might have been sitting on the desk for hours, doing nothing. Or so I think. Then when I pick it up, I notice it has been busy rebooting itself and all my useful applications have been closed.
• At completely random times, it says “Error! App closed Main” even without any applications open. No operations are affected by this seemingly serious error message.
• Sometimes I get alarms from already-deleted calendar events. Sometimes I don’t.

The older I get, the more I find out that the majority of the world is constructed in a quite haphazard manner. It’s kind of scary and one of the major reasons why I have serious doubts about ever getting into the airline, nuclear or other really critical systems business. I may not want to find out what kind of systems make these run. Complexity beyond what we can understand can lead to some disastrous consequences, as pointed out by James Chiles in his book Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology. (Highly recommended reading, btw. I might write a review of this one of these days even if it’s been years since I read it.)

But back to the phone – despite the shortcomings and bugs, I would not change back to my old phone. It works well enough and the new features it offers are great. But I would like it if it, along with many other technological innovations, worked really well. Along with, say, my toaster. Although I suppose for my Windows OS to be working well is hoping for too much

Somebody’s been satisficing. Again.