Sigh. Fine. I'll Take Two.

I realize that tech companies are not going to scramble to register the slogan "You never know.  It might not suck." with the US Patent and Trademark Office, but I am tired of feeling like someone is constantly trying to trick me. Frankly, it's exhausting trying to predict if the actual happiness I will get from a tech purchase will meet the level of joy the advertisers imply I will have after I buy their gizmo. 

Picture a frontier town in the late 1800s.  A traveling snake oil salesman rolls into town and hawks his wares and leaves.  Maybe the potions and elixirs work, maybe not.  Maybe he gets lynched or run out of town on a rail, maybe not. 

Now picture that same town hosting an endless parade of the shysters, where the number of the salespeople far outnumber any possible posse that could be mustered to mete out old-timey justice. The the bar for what is acceptable gets lower and lower and lower. Some of the seemingly never-ending parade are selling obvious junk, but some have stuff that you might want.  Some even have things you actually need.  The kicker is that every item is advertised exactly as enthusiastically as the next, blurring the line between what is actually awesome and what is merely garbage dressed up for church.

Terrible products become marginally acceptable and marginal products get re-branded as awesome. As long as the product meets an easily attainable bare minimum and no one gets hurt, the salespeople are lynch-proof, because, after all, everyone is doing it. If the device works, or, if rumors of it working are “leaked”, that info actually makes the news.

This is probably why many supposed general tech/science news sites are mostly about cell phones, Facebook, Angry Birds, and the like.  Oh, occasionally you will see an article or two about some real science thing.  As of this writing, the token science article on Google Sci/Tech news talks about saving endangered vertebrates.  The other 19 articles are about gadgets you should consider buying or online services you should use because everyone else does.

I have no one to blame but myself for allowing myself to get suckered into buying things that seem to serve no purpose except to make me angry.  For example, my Prius infuriates me on a daily basis.  Hey, the 50 mpg is great.  The car is very roomy and is peppier than my old Escort.  So why the anger?  Well, the car bristles with awkward, barely functional techno-bling and it is like a paper cut to my soul every time I sit in it.  I could fill a whole blog post with whiny annoyances but the short story is that the gestalt of all the petty shortcomings I have noticed over the years is a big ol' ball oozing with irrational hate.

That level of bizarre hate is nothing compared to how I felt about my Treo (Windows) for the same reason - it did a million things, all badly. Speaking of which...

I consider Microsoft to be the "Democratic Party" of the tech world -  they can take a great idea and seemingly unlimited funding and magically turn it into suck at the drop of a hat.  Sure, they say they can do all these awesome things but, when it comes right down to it, all they are good at is saying that they are going to do awesome things.

I like the idea of the Kinect for the Xbox, but I have seen no real-life demos of the hardware and software and all the stuff online seems uber-contrived.  The people in the commercials seem to be having a blast but the cuts between scenes are so short I can't objectively judge what's going on.  There is a definite three-card-Monte feel to the whole thing, almost as if the salespeople thought "Hey, maybe if we jump from image to unbearably happy image fast enough, no one will notice video synchronization problems or the fact that the delighted family appears to have a living room the size of the banquet hall at Hogwarts."

Yes, I still want one.

I have long ago made peace with the fact that I am a gullible idiot and the scent of long-chain monomers outgassing from new techno-junk easily overrides what little remains of the common sense center of my brain.  If it wasn't for the fact that I am successfully married (and, therefore, have outsourced a significant portion of my cash and decision-making ability to someone far more capable and trustworthy than myself) I would probably be living under a bridge and muttering profanities at my shopping cart filled with kinda-working, next-big-thing electronics gear.

I look forward to being happily angry at the maybe-awesome-but-very-probably-not Kinect as early as next week.  Not “how come I gotta fill out 47 license agreements and personal info forms to use my iPod” angry like I was a couple of nights ago, I hope. That frightened even me.

Just in case, though, I am going to spend the next week or so practicing fuming at my own idiocy so I am in tip-top shape and don't cramp up when the time comes.