Don't feed me planned obsolescence.

Why is it that we can send monkeys into space, but we can't or won't make home electronics equipment that doesn't break down for absolutely no reason whatsoever? Take my DVD player. Please (ha ha ha). I watched "The Anniversary Party" last night (which proved so damn boring that I opted to stop it part way through) when my DVD player decided to give me the big "fuck you, organic boy" and shut down. Nothing worked. Not the remote. Not the buttons on the machine. Nada. So I decide to unplug it and see if I could get that bad boy moving again. Uh uh. No power. No nothing. Dead as the dodo.

That my DVD player is now a $250 paperweight doesn't bother me (I can get it fixed). But what does piss me off is that there's a rental DVD trapped in the bowels of that piece of crap that will soon start costing me late fees. And to add insult to injury, it wasn't even a good movie, unless you happen to be the kind of person who can get into the lives of quirky Hollywood millionaires and feel sorry for the poor, rich Xanax'd up bastards. Me, I wanted to hit them all with a fire axe. Maybe that's a tactic I could try on my DVD player.

The most aggravating thing of all is that I know damn well that the corporate fucks who build these pieces of crap have the technology to make them last forever, but choose to install some kind of self-destruct mechanism to keep people coming back for more shoddy home electronics. Or maybe it's the fact these things are assembled by 8 year-old Malaysian kids working for $0.06 an hour. Compared to that, having a busted DVD player isn't such a big problem, I suppose. But still: late charges blow.