A review of the life product
Four stars
It’s a competitive consumer landscape out there and it can be difficult to know what to invest your time in. Personally, I’ve had this product (human existence) for 42 years, bordering on 43, and I thought I’d offer a brief overview of my customer experience so far.
DEVELOPMENT OF PRODUCT USE
The item was given to me in Nottingham, England in the early 1980s. To be clear, I don’t remember much of its early years; when the product pops out of the box it’s very small and breakable, and at that stage you’re almost entirely dependent on customer support. Just installing communication software on the product takes a matter of years and even that starts out quite primitive in nature.
Plus you’re not necessarily even going to get the best support team for these early vulnerable stages; I did fine with mine, but I get the sense that others received such minimal (or even actively counterproductive) support that it affected their products’ subsequent functioning and even lifespan. Products which don't get adequate customer support at the outset often require extensive and expensive troubleshooting when mature.
Relatedly, if you try and upload communication software in different languages on the product past the early stage of use it inevitably uploads as, if serviceable, slightly unreliable and aurally corrupted.
Likewise, even if the product makes it intact to the next stage of development, there’s no guarantee that your unit is going to be popular with other users. I myself found my product’s relatively high performance in certain early tests served to only make interactions with other debutante units more difficult, particularly in the earlier days of ownership and if my product had, say, shown great output product quality than others during testing. You’d think that the answer would be to surround yourself with units with similar processing capacities, but even there unusual dynamics, such as the deliberate spreading of rumours about the performance of your product components, can dominate.
You also need to learn how to, for the sake of intense data exchanges, attract other products than your own. It takes a while to work out exactly what kind of other units you’re trying to win over – they come in all shapes and sizes, with two dominant types of interface – a curiosity which for many only intensifies as your unit begins to acquire independence.
Eventually, and counter-intuitively, I found the best way to facilitate this process was simply to stand my unit next to one I was trying to interact with and keep communication attempts to a minimum. If that process does end up working, I have to say it’s one of the more attractive features of this particular product design. It really is a tremendous way to clear the system of steam.
FLAWS IN PRODUCT DESIGN
One of the major issues of the product is, in my experience, that you often find yourself wondering why exactly you’ve ended up with the product at all. It was, after all, itself given to you by experienced older users. You were never issued with either a warranty or a receipt, let alone product instructions.
There is, however, an emergency self-shutdown procedure and on days when you’re struggling to get the best out of the item you do sometimes find yourself wondering if you should activate it. If you should just have done with maintenance before it enters into irreversible operational decline. I’ve heard of other people in similar situations who haven’t felt that customer service is there for them at all and indeed have taken the option of that permanent off-switch, tho oddly some of them seem to have seen activating a total wipe as a temporary measure.
Personally, I’ve found customer service has been really useful in such situations, and other users have also often offered spontaneous support drawn from their own experiences. Indeed, allowing that the product inevitably withstands a little wear and tear to its casing over time, I have even noticed some gradual improvements to its overall functioning with time, such as the products’ reaction to processing malfunctions – at which time it’s almost always the best approach to put it in a cool dark room, turn it off for ten hours then on again!
And of course, always give it a little water.
In addition, even as confusing new products proliferate and your own product specs begin their slide into programmed obsolescence, there’s much solace in the company of others with equally declining units, many of whom remember the unique circumstances and challenges of your product generation.
NEXT GENERATION PRODUCTS
One of the major questions for all product users, whatever their unit compatibilities, is in whether to pursue the product add-in schemes. This means that you yourself take on a customer support role for the latest product designs.
In this case your own battery life and earned credits become largely dedicated to trying to advance the next generation of units, dedicating more and more of your own processing capacities and resources to developing them, often on call 24/7; you’re basically assuming your own customer service role.
For this reason, normal users find themselves restricted to at most two of three of the next gen prods. Before they even get to the stage, they also spend some time seeking a reliable product to pool resources with for the purposes of add-on acquisition, and even there some pretty fundamental incompatibilities can emerge.
Personally, I’ve found the original product a sufficient distraction. Indeed, I worry I wouldn’t be able to look after a next generation product at all, especially given how much I value the attention of my own latest companion product! I’ve also always worried about choosing the product for others given the amount of issues some aspects of its good functioning have presented me with.
Nonetheless, I’ve discussed quite extensively with other next-gen product users. They’re unanimously besotted with their next gen products and indeed many of them feel these little add-ons have superseded the value of their original product itself. Some of them even say it was the whole point they got their products in the first place!
However, some of them do worry about the long-term perspective for their next-gens. Will updates still be available? Will there be sufficient charging facilities? Can the latest market arrivals even count on existing levels of maintenance?
To be clear, that isn’t why I personally haven’t elected for a next gen. I’ve quite simply never felt able to afford on, let alone multiple and haven’t felt inclined either to enter into debt in order to cover one’s start-up costs. Indeed, when I see another user flanked by a crowd of noisy, leaking, unruly add-ons, I still feel more sorrow than envy. I guess you just have to have made that investment to understand. After all, it’s hard to admit you regret making such a big purchase.
WOULD I RECOMMEND THE PRODUCT TO OTHERS?
In many ways, it’s a strange question, as it wasn’t my choice to initiate the product in the first place; that was done by a pair of older products some decades ago now. I guess they felt that they had to have a next gen.
Happily enough, these two products are still operational, tho it's become increasingly difficult to replace their missing parts. They’ve tried to hand over a lot of their operational insights to me, but it sadly remains the case that most of their data will go with their products winding down. These products go back a long way and most of them, no matter how many features they once had, end up like this; on the scrap heap, data banks forever inacessible.
I never have never quite lost the strangeness of being in possession of the product at all. Oh, I know pretty much what I do or want to do with the product by now; I use the social interface, I try and acquire new functions, I push the product on long distances at pace to try and keep processing functions up to date. And to be honest I still use the self-stimulation function just as much as I did when the product was 17. But I still don’t know exactly why I have this product and why right now. Which are very different questions as to whether I want to keep it or not.
For sure, I admit there have been days when I’ve been deadly frustrated with the whole customer experience, particularly when the product has failed to achieve targets that I set for it, and I’ve wanted nothing more than to throw the grimy old thing in the river.
Nonetheless there’s been other days and indeed rather a lot of them when the product has endlessly surprised me as to what it is capable of. The sheer distances it can run, for one!
It’s such an odd thing, this product, because even if you have it, but you’re not entirely sure what it is. You're still learning new features even as the old ones erode. You can be having an awful and a great time with it at once.
Overall, it has just about been worth it to take stewardship of this ever-so-complex machine. After all, if I’d completely given up on it, I wouldn’t even be writing this review, would I? Let alone reading articles as to how product lifespan can be eked out for a further few years with timely maintenance. I may not ever quite understand the product, but I’m not ready to return it just yet.
****