Follow the money…

Sorry. This one may stray a bit from the earth sciences, but I have to ask: How ridiculous can we be?

It reminds me of the early days of the railroad, when the gauge of the tracks — that’s the distance between the rails — was different when you went from one state to another. An inevitable inconsistency when there were so many different companies in the early days of the railroads.

Say you had a load of supplies on a train in New Jersey, and got as far as the Pennsylvania border. What happened next? They had to stop the train, unload everything, and move it across the border onto a new train in order to get it to Philly.

Even our founding fathers were smart enough to figure out this was counterproductive, and the Powers That Be finally decided to set the gauge of the railroads to be the same for the national railroad network that they wanted in the hopes of facilitating interstate commerce. They were, after all, trying to fashion the United States of America!

We’re seeing a similar thing happening now with chargers for all of our electronic toys. Case in point: Susie is taking one of her granddaughters on a two-week trip to the East Coast, and while packing yesterday morning, she was sorting through all of the chargers that she’d need — including the cables and bricks —to keep her electronic leashes fully charged on the trip.

The good news is that four of the five electronic wonders were Apple products (save her Kindle), so the whole process should have been relatively simple. I mean really: one company with multiple devices would surely simplify the charging process, and attempt to standardize it across all of the goodies in the interest of efficiency and good customer service (one of the things that Apple has always claimed to be all about).

But, what a nightmare it (again) turned out to be! We finally got it put together and made it to the airport in time to meet up with Brooklyn and get on the plane. Unfortunately, their flight got canceled, forcing her to stay the night at the Granddaughter’s house (ten minutes from the airport, as opposed to the ninety minutes back to our place in the woods). The plan was that they would mirror the original scheduling and fly out today (we’ll see).

But that really doesn’t have anything to do with his story. What does matter is that her carefully orchestrated brick/cable sorting fell apart last evening, with too many different moving parts for an already frazzled and frustrated mind to deal with.

Panic! What’s a poor girl to do? Well, she did what any thinking person would do: phone a friend (in this case, yours truly). We talked it out and it turns out that she actually had all the right pieces with her, but with five devices needing five unique cables going into two different bricks that go into the wall, it’s easy to get confused.

As I said above, most of the devices that Susie is trying to work with are from the same company. And there’s the rub. One would think that Apple, with their billions of dollars in profits, would take the needs of their customers — their loyal fan base, if you will — and make it a bit easier. I mean, really, isn’t that the mantra they’ve been preaching now for over forty years?

But no! Apple — and others, to be sure — love to keep it as proprietary as possible so we have to keep buying new accessories to make sure our stuff will continue to work. It reminds me of an ink-jet printer: the initial cost is next to nothing, but out of the box the printer only includes enough ink for a handful of copies, and then you need to sell your eldest child in order to afford the replacement cartridges.

This approach may suck for the customer (that would be us), but their shareholders just love it!

I really don’t want to beat a dead horse here, but don’t you think that the people that are producing and marketing the high-tech stuff today can at least be half as smart (and efficient) as the founding fathers were two hundred years ago? How gullible can we be?

Hey, I’m just asking the question.