The first time the manufacturer of a machine you work with daily announces the date it will cease support you don’t feel anything.  As years move on and you watch your friends limp through existence relying on junk yards and third party patches to keep chugging along it starts to get harder to check your weekly notifications from Cisco, Apple, and Microsoft.  

When a new death letter arrives you either spend an inordinate amount of time with them trying to wring as much “quality time” as you can out of them, or you shun them immediately.  No longer can you bare the gaze of the already dead. One day you find a machine you can’t live without, and sign an interpersonal licensing agreement with it.

You can already see the errors cropping up. They come slowly at first.  Maybe an odd stutter when overly excited.  You look for a firmware update, but see that there hasn’t been a new one in over a year. Eventually there’s an infection that won’t go away no matter how many times you clean it. Suddenly the lights are on, but response is slow and incoherent.

11:49 am  •  12 July 2012  •  1 note  •  View comments