Why, just 20 minutes ago a game crashed on me. Other instances in which Technology has failed me: The Autoclave malfunctioned and my equipment was not properly sterilised. That was fun. Took 2 days to figure out that it was the faulty autoclave causing problems, and then it took a week to repair that ageing hunk of junk. I had to take every jar, bottle, and many, many liquids up two floors every time I needed something sterilized for a week. Not fun. Especially when those bottles contain biologically hazardous waste and you need to put on protective gear, get the special cart, put every container in ANOTHER container and wait for the elevator in a very busy building to be empty because you're not allowed to have someone without Protective gear in the elevator with you when you're transporting the stuff. Then, after about 2 to 4 hours when everything's been sterilised, you have to do it all over again and unpack everything and screw the lids back on. It's annoying (although vital) enough to sterilise every single bit of media or water or jar or container when the autoclave is in the same room as you. It's really annoying when you have to use someone else's, especially when they have to use it too (then they get annoyed that you're taking up space in the autoclave).
Usually when technology fails on me, I send for the repairers and technicians to put it back together, then I incessantly beg whoever has a working version of whatever broke to let me use it. In the case of the autoclave, I had to borrow another floor's autoclave, but the catch was that I often could only use it at night, since they had to sterilise their own stuff. So at the end of the day, instead of going home, I had to prepare anything I needed to use the next day and put it in at about 5:00pm, and wait, sometimes for nearly 4 hours, for it to be done, since leaving things in the autoclave overnight is a good way of ensuring that it won't be sterile when you need it in the morning. When you live about 1 hour away from your work place, leaving home late can get very, very annoying.
I know autoclaves are expensive. But we were using one that looked like it had been made in 1952! It was a decrepit, rusting, primitive piece of junk that was twice as large as the other models, yet SOMEHOW having even LESS space to put things in! And the pressure gauge didn't properly work, it would never go to zero, so everytime you opened it, you couldn't be entirely sure that when you did, it wouldn't hit you with boiling steam right in your face (which is the reason why we had the rule that, to go anywhere near it, you had to wear heat-resistant gloves, heat-resistant smock, and fully-surrounding eye wear to open it, and usually you'd stand off to the side and open it while ducking quickly away so as not to get burned).
By the Gods I hated that autoclave. I still hate it. Like those guys from Office Space, I would really like to take a big hammer to it and bash it to pieces, if only so that no one else in the future would have to deal with that piece of crap. Apart from my old 1995 Epson printer, I can't think of any other piece of machinery that I hated more than that damn autoclave.
As for my 95 Epson Printer - you had to re-calibrate it everytime you wanted to print something. Every. Single. Time. Or it wouldn't come out right. Also, any document more advanced that a TXT file confused the hell out of it, and it would print half-pages, or the wrong colour, or the images would be in the wrong size. I had the latest drivers for it - the printer just sucked. But I was poor, so I had no choice but to soldier on with it. When it died for good, I laughed. I also then broke it to pieces and used some of its components as paper weights.
