I went to make some copies just now and as the copies were being made, the copy machine had yet another misfeed and broke down again. If I had a nickel for every time this particular machine broke down – I could have one sculpted out of solid gold. Couple that with the fact that my laptop and desktop office computer both crashed this week, my Dish Network went out just when the premiere of That’s My Bush! was on – and my printer would not print anything for me yesterday. This constant pattern of every electronic object I have encountered this week malfunctioning on me have made me question whether or not electronic objects have a mind of their own.

Did you ever notice that your electronic equipment breaks down at the most inopportune time? It’s as if the equipment is saying, “Nah – I’d rather not work today and I am going to ruin your day by making sure that you can not get done what you need to do.” And what about when you are in the middle of typing something and the computer crashes and you lose whatever you have typed so far? It’s like the computer is getting even with you by erasing what you just wrote. Or my personal favorite – when cordless phone batteries die in the middle of a conversation despite the fact that it charged for the past eleven hours. It’s as if the phone is telling you when your conversation should end.

My relationship with electronics has always been a love/hate one. I can’t live without them – but I want to take a sledgehammer to every piece of electronic equipment I have ever owned at least at one point during the time I use it. Maybe it’s me, but I feel like they are alive and they screw with us as humans on purpose. Think about it. How many times have you wanted to take a baseball bat to something electronic because it broke, crashed, froze, shorted out – or simply malfunctioned? How many times have your favorite tapes been eaten by a VCR or cassette player? How many times has your printer, copy machine or fax machine jammed? And how many times did you wish that electronic objects would work the way they are supposed to?

I guess no matter how hard we try to make the next group of electronic equipment better then the last – they always seem to malfunction anyway. It seems that no matter what, we will always be at the mercy of electronic equipment for as long as they want us to be. Let’s hope that one day we humans will win the war against machines and become the dominant species on Earth once again.