Boston's airport is run by a bunch of incompetent castoffs from all of the other state agencies that seem to relish applying maximum manpower to minimize anything decent about a modern airport. The other day upon returning to my car from a trip away, I found one of those baggage trolleys trying to eat the rear of my car, sort of like a big English wrench clamped between the undercarriage and the top of the trunk (how a cart like this can wedge in this way probably has something to do with Mayor Menino's third cousin twice removed who gave up a career in carburetor repair to design a better Smart Cart and ended up using the jacks at his garage for inspiration).
After a long wait for one of the 15 roving tow trucks which seem to prize cruising slowly around the parking lot above say, helping motorists, I decided to take my Skeletool to the cart in the hopes of disassembling enough of it to get out. As I got underneath the car I realized that a part of the cart (again designed after garage equipment) seemed to be poking into what I thought was the car's gas tank thus making for a much more fun evening at the airport.
In the end the puncture wasn't really deep enough (and further research has revealed that it was not in fact the gas tank), so off I went. But as I was driving home, I was reminded of how proud I had been that in the case of this particular car everything is "sealed," meaning that from the day I drove it off the lot two years ago, it's been to the dealer once, precisely when the car's computer told me to take it in, a stark contrast to every other car I've had where intimacy with the various parts of the drivetrain or heating system became a necessary survival skill.
The car experience is not unlike those I've had with several other "sealed" devices as of late: my Tivo HD's 2-year service recently expired, and when I realized I couldn't purchase another 2-year contract but had to instead go on a ghastly month-to-month plan that cost more for the EPG than I pay for cable, I decided to let it lapse. Except that now I've got a brick: I can't manually record, and every time I change the channel, I get a popup that tells me to go pay for the month-to-month to use my very own piece of hardware. Ditto for all of the old iPhones in my life— each of them is only mistaken firmware update away from the "Connect to iTunes" bricking that only a painful jailbreak process can fix (and thank God we have that option).
As consumers we love these set-and-forget seamless experiences— be they cars, Tivos, or cellphones. With these type of experiences being every product designer's foremost goal, and companies obsessed with service (or annuity) business models, we're trading something important for all of that convenience— the ability to control our own hardware beyond the life of the original service contract. Or more importantly, the ability to know anything more than the most elemental operating guidelines for the things that surround us, and may in time come to suffocate us.
I'm not looking forward to the increasing amounts of product detritus accumulating throughout my life because of this phenomenon and would prefer more open systems that give these things second lives beyond their initial service period. Sort of like the utopian vision laid out in Makers, where tinkering with old gadgets becomes second hand to the a whole bunch of people tired of this sealed product life.
And I may never again want to know where my car's gas tank is by the way, but I might want someone other than the dealer to be able to patch up the little hickie Boston airport gave it.