Planned obsolescence is one of those things that can make a low grade luddite like myself just want to give up on society and live in a cave in Kentucky somewhere. Yeah it'd be damp and filled with centipedes and bat droppings, but I also wouldn't have to worry about my WiFi router exploding for no reason or my new laptop deciding that today is a bad day to get any work done.
It's especially irritating when you drop hundreds of dollars on a product, only to find that it has a useable shelf life of about half a development cycle for the slightly altered version of the same product that you'll inevitably buy anyway because we're all beholden to a consumerist system that encourages throwing wads of cash at pimply faced Best Buy employees.
Still, as annoying as living in modern society can be (what with our vaccines and instantaneous access to all human knowledge), I imagine that it's even worse when your investment in a product isn't $179.99, it's 35 million dollars.
Jim Harbaugh is very much like a tricky high end piece of equipment. It's kind of astounding and amazing when working at peak capacity, but there are frequent blowups and glitches that the engineers didn't have time to iron out before the product hit the showroom floor.
So that's why I called the Jim Harbaugh consumer support line to help out our Hate Bros up north.
*beep beep boop beep boop boop beep*
"Hello! Thank you for calling the support line for Jim Harbaugh Industries, a Dockers™ brand and a subsidiary of Levi Strauss & Co.! To proceed in English, press one. Para Espanol, oprima numero dos."
*beep*
"Thank you! Due to the overwhelming number of calls that we are currently receiving, we recommend that you refer to our Jim Harbaugh user's manual, located in the front left pocket of your Jim Harbaugh. To register an impending sense that Jim Harbaugh is possibly unhinged in a bad way and is perhaps not the automatic savior that Michigan football desperately needs, press four on your keypad repeatedly for the next thirty seconds as needed. Thank you, and have a good day."
*beep*
*beep*
*beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep*
Click here for a slightly better looking (but not any funnier) version.
Edit: So, a few Michigan fans have pointed out that this article is similar to one written by Matt Barrows for the Sacramento Bee back in December (and reappeared on MGoBlog a few days ago). And, well... they're right. Dammit. I don't really read MGoBlog or the Bee all that often, and wasn't aware of his piece (which is funnier than mine, also dammit), but let me tell you a story.
About five years ago when I first started writing for 11W, I wrote a dumb article about bowl games in northern states that was nearly identical to one that Matt Hinton, formerly of Sunday Morning QB, had written and they published almost at the same time. Same freaking picture of Woody Hayes in the snow and everything. I freaked out, wrote an apology e-mail to Hinton, and he basically said that this is the offseason, baby! Don't worry about it, we're all grinding for content and there's bound to be overlap.
Still, this is 11W and we've gotta be better than that, so props to Matt Barrows for coming up with the idea first. Even if he did lack the meticulously crafted pamphlet. And, I guess, props to the Michigan fans for pointing this out. God I hate you guys.
