Shane Hegarty's encyclopaedia of modern Ireland
Anybody who has bought an electrical appliance in the past few years will have heard the shop assistant say: "You’ll get that problem with that model"; "It will cost you more to fix it than it would to buy a new one"; or, "Sure, things aren’t built to last any more." Oddly, they forgot to mention any of this when you bought your Juice-O-Matic, only two months earlier.
In the modern world, everything breaks. It’s called built-in obsolescence, meaning that everything is designed to last until precisely the moment when it’s just easier to get a new one. Toasters, washing machines, computers, vacuum cleaners: if something has more than two functioning parts, at least one will go the day after you throw the receipt in the bin.
Companies have become fiendishly brilliant in their timing. Notice how your MP3 player will break at the precise moment of a press conference to announce a new model that is small enough to fit into a molar cavity.
In fact, the time period has shortened so much that an electrical store is only ever a week away from having a shopful of broken DVD players and microwaves. In the future, your washing machine will be German-engineered to pop a seal as soon as the delivery van backs out of your driveway. It makes a mockery, in fact, of such movies as Terminator. If you were ever to be chased by a murderous robot from the future, you could relax in the knowledge that its element would burn out the moment it tried to shoot lasers from its eyes.
The situation has almost reached the point of absurdity. It now seems as if you have to go back to the shop at least three times before you get a toaster that works. When you witnessed the post-Christmas frenzy at the tills, it was worth bearing in mind that half those people were replacing a Juice-O-Matic that had choked on the first banana to be waved at it. Meanwhile, your grandmother still uses a kettle she’s had since the Emergency. Sure, scale is rotting the spout, and it requires a foot pump to get it going, but it works, damn it.
They knew the value of workmanship then. Unlike now, when durability has been in decline ever since the day manufacturers coined the oxymoron "consumer durables". The problem has become so endemic you can’t help but wonder if it’s only the consumer who faces this problem. When you’re lying on a theatre table having a triple bypass, is the surgeon smacking the side of the life-support machine and exclaiming: "I knew this piece of crap was faulty from the day I bought it"?