Last Friday I drove my mother in law's S60 to Calgary for its annual service - and while waiting for it at the dealership talked to a guy who was there to try to trade in his German yupmobile. According to him, they wouldn't give him a fair price -but then, the reason he's desperate to unload something with less than 20,000 kilometers on it is that it tends to die on the road: twice, he told me, on the highway near Banff.
According to him, he's had multiple software upgrades in the eight months he's owned it, but most of the time something - the built in phone, the GPS, the door locks, the ignition, something, doesn't work.
I listened, more or less politely - I rather had the impression he expected his daddy or some other old geezer acting in loco to fix the problem for him - but did manage to penetrate his egotism long enough at one point to cause him to pause by nearly giggling out loud at wrong time: something that happened because I started out thinking about the whole software by Microsoft thing in terms of the old jokes along the lines of "if Microsoft made cars" but then switched to day dreaming a different comparison: one between Windows and six year olds:
| Windows | Six year old | |
| Reliability | ERROR_SERVICE_REQUEST_TIMEOUT | but Daddy, I am brushing |
| Can be trusted out of sight | DNS_ERROR_RCODE_NOTAUTH | But Daddy! we were just having fun |
| Cron | ERROR_INVALID_OWNER | but Daddy, Mommy said I didn't have to |
| Trustworthy WRT sensitive data | ERROR_INVALID_MESSAGE | Teacher: Who's got Show and tell? 6yr old: I do! I Do! Teacher: What is it? 6yr old (waving digital camera) I have pictures of Daddy chasing the puppy, outside, at night, in the snow, naked. |
Well, on the positive side, I have hope for one: he'll be seven in a couple of weeks.