My mum kept trying to foist a wireless telephone on me, because then I could use the telephone in bed, or whatever. So this goes on for awhile, but the recharge

My mum kept trying to foist a wireless telephone on me, because then I could use the telephone in bed, or whatever. So this goes on for awhile, but the rechargeable batteries never seem to recharge properly, so the phone goes dead a short while into the conversation. I finally decided "screw all this", and got a cheap corded phone for a few quid. It Just Works (TM). We get the odd power cut, which means that my parents have to fish an old phone out of the drawer so that they can still use the telephone. Our internet is intermittent, too. People keep banging on about the environment, privacy concerns about big companies like Facebook are in the public eye, and there's plenty of stories of these smart devices stopping working. Yet people keep buying these overcomplicated, expensive devices with multiple failure points. I can't believe people can be that stupid not to see the obvious drawbacks. L'il update: when I was a schoolboy doing my 'O' levels, one subject I studied was Technical Drawing. One day, the teacher showed us a pulley. It was used in industrial machinery. It was housed in a little cage which swivelled open. There was a "nipple" at the top to allow for lubrication. I marvelled about how much attention to detail someone had put into a humble pulley. Later on, I came to a strange realisation: there are actually two forms of engineering: industrial, and consumer. Industrial engineering is for stuff that actually has to work, and work properly. Consumer engineering: deliberately designed crap. It's the kind of thinking which leads one to welding batteries onto the phone itself. In some respects, I feel it's the opposite of engineering. Then I think back to how there was some guy, decades ago, that sat down and designed a pulley that was robust and could actually be maintained.