Yesterday evening I finished assembling some shelves from IKEA, and then decided to fix supper, which involved reheating some lamb curry that I’d made the day before. I put the covered glass dish (also from IKEA, as it happens) into the microwave, programmed 5 minutes at 50% power, and left the kitchen. When I returned I found this:
The lid of the bowl had shattered into four or five large pieces; there were also plenty of tiny slivers of glass.
The interesting thing about this is that I did not immediately think, “Those !@^*$%#s at IKEA! What a piece of $#^*&!!” Instead I was struck by how completely unexpected this was. I’m pretty sure that 20 years ago I would have found such a product failure far less surprising. Things used to malfunction occasionally, and no-one was particularly taken aback when failures occurred. Today, I think, there’s a much greater expectation that stuff will just work, routinely, perfectly. Of course there are areas which seem to contradict this – some electronic appliances, for example – but in most of these cases we tend to overlook how dramatically we’re pushing the technology envelope. It’s hardly surprising that products depending on new technologies and (especially) production processes would have unexpected failure modes.
Anyway, I was able to find something else for supper….