This past weekend I was getting out of the car when I realized car doors don’t close right, the kind of light bulbs that last ten years don’t last ten years, and computers ask questions they have no intention of doing anything with about. I also realized these are all first world problems but, well frankly, those are the kinds of problem I most encounter.

Let’s look at those cars doors. Every other door in the (first) world either opens or closes. Most exterior and interior house doors have latches or knobs and you push them open and they stay open or fasten them closed and then stay closed. Some even have pneumatic or motorized closers that close them for you, and thus a name that has nothing to do with baseball. Refrigerator doors have those magnetic strips that run the complete inner rim of the door with the expressed purpose of making certain the door, when not opened, is indeed closed. An entire industry has been created around the process of opening and closing garage doors. The point is that most all doors in most all buildings are mostly always open or always closed unless you take steps to leave them partially opened (or, for the half empty types, partially closed).

Car doors are a different breed. Yes car doors have a latching mechanism that ensures the door remains in the closed position until you take steps to open it (a perfectly reasonable expectation of a car door when travelling down the highway at 15 miles over the posted speed limit), but only the car door has taken pains to provide the user with a position not open yet not quite closed (and a quite unreasonable position on that same highway). So often are these doors in this position that car manufacturers have taken steps to alert the driver that a door is not completely closed by means of a warning light on the dash panel. Would it not be a more reasonable resolution to take steps to make a door that closes completely? Perhaps the car makers should get together with the refrigerator makers.

Now, speaking of lights, I have this pole lamp in the corner of my living that has graced the corner of this living room, the previous living room, a family room, and a room that once had aspirations of being a den but became a nursery instead. As you can see, it’s a versatile and, at least in my opinion, an attractive light. I bought it about 15 years ago. I almost didn’t buy it. It was pricey for the time and for its type and that, I was told, was due to the light’s lamp. Lamp’s light? It has (had) a most usual bulb that looks like a miniature fluorescent tube that had the added bonus of a built in dimming mechanism. I questioned this arrangement, not to mention the price, before making the purchase. I was assured that the dimmer worked as well in the home as in the showroom, that indeed it was expensive and when it comes time to replace the bulb it too will be expensive, but that its bulb would last at least 10 years if not longer.

Well indeed it was expensive but it worked as advertised and its bulb lasted more than the claimed 10 years. I use the past tense here because after those ten and half again more years the bulb has given its all. I never found out if the replacement bulb is expensive because when I went to buy said replacement bulb I was told that “they haven’t made those for at least ten years now, but, who knows, maybe you can find something on the Internet.”

So to home I went, in my car with the now fully closed doors, fired up the old desktop computer and thought I’d check my email before beginning my what would probably be fruitless search for a miniature, dimmable, fluorescent light bulb. A message from my doctor’s hospital organization was there telling me I had a message on their server. (If they can send me a message that says I have a message why can’t they just send me the message? That may be Thursday’s post.) So I signed on to their server with my user name and super secret password and was immediately presented with a pop up window asking me if I want my browser to remember my super secret password. I suppose so I was not confused by this question I was presented with multiple choice answers. — Yes — Not Now — Never —  And as I do every time I am asked that same question entering that same site I select “Never.”

And then I wonder…we can’t even make doors that close all the way and I expect a computer to understand the concept of never.