Logan’s Run: Travel technology’s inspiration

Sometime in the 23rd century, the survivors of war, overpopulation and pollution are living in a great domed city, sealed away from the forgotten world outside. Here, in an ecologically balanced world, mankind lives only for pleasure, freed by the servo-mechanisms which provide everything. There’s just one catch. Life must end at thirty.

- Introduction to the 1976 movie “Logan’s Run”

Sometime in the 21st century, the survivors of airline deregulation, overpriced technology and the Microsoft monopoly are living in a great domed city, sealed away from the forgotten world outside. Here, in a technologically unbalanced world, mankind lives for confusion, enslaved by the servo-mechanisms, which promise everything but provide nothing. There’s just one catch. Life must end … at one.

All true except for the great domed city part. I’m not kidding.

The folks who designed the technology that we take on the road with us today must have been inspired by the Sci-Fi kitsch fest starring Michael York and Farrah Fawcett. Only, instead of the propeller-heads expiring at age 30 – which for some of us end-users might be a good thing – they build gadgets and script software that don’t last longer than a year.

It’s an improbable rule that I call Logan’s Law of Technology.

It says that for all intents and purposes, technology doesn’t last longer than a year. Not because it becomes obsolete, but because it just stops working.

Case in point: The laptop computer. When a new notebook arrives on at your office, it boots up in a New York minute, it runs fast, and it usually does exactly what you tell it to do. Then you start installing software – PowerPoint, Outlook, Eudora or Word. Things start to slow down.

You install more software. Things really start to slow down. Suddenly, it’s as if the PC has a mind of its own. You try to launch an application, but it doesn’t budge. Maybe the system needs more memory? You upgrade, but nothing happens. Then, just about a year to the day after you bought the laptop and on almost the precise day that your warranty expires, things go from bad to worse. The PC freezes spontaneously, it stops communicating with peripherals, and it behaves very, very badly.

Likewise, Logan’s Law of Technology applies to other gadgets that we rely on. Cell phones spontaneously implode after 12 months – buttons stick, software melts down, antennas break. Personal Digital Assistants are notorious examples of Logan in action. Almost as if on cue, something short-circuits, rendering the device only partially operable.

We know this happens to technology users in general, but for business travelers, it’s particularly problematic. Out in the field, we’re often far away from tech help or replacement parts, so all we can do is curse those dagblasted servo-mechanisms that die almost on cue and wonder why we didn’t know any better than to take that PC on a trip if we knew that its one-year anniversary was imminent.

To be fair to the industry, the lifecycle of a desktop computer is generally 24 to 36 months. A laptop computer’s is 18 to 24 months, and little information is available for PDAs and other handheld convergence devices. That’s a fairly reasonable amount of time. However, if you check with a large company or a state or federal agency that buys these devices in bulk, you’ll probably hear a different perspective. One state agency recently noted that the “standard may not be suited to an agency’s needs unless that agency has analyzed its needs and matched them to the technologies and resources available.” Translation: don’t believe everything the tech vendors tell you.

I certainly won’t. My desktop computer recently met its destiny according to Logan’s Law with such uncanny punctuality that I am more convinced than ever of a conspiracy to rig technology to die after 12 months of use.

The device in question is my Dell desktop. I don’t travel with it, but it’s a PC, and I’ve seen laptops do the same thing in the past.

Do what? Fall apart. It started with an internal clock that didn’t quite work the way it was supposed to, and which the manufacturer insisted wouldn’t interfere with the overall functionality of the computer. The DSL modem software wouldn’t play nice with my analog modem software, causing the entire system to freeze. Defragmenting the drive didn’t help.

A few months before the dreaded one-year anniversary, things really took a turn for the worse. Every time I rebooted the PC it took longer and longer to load up and the system ran slower and slower. Soon I had to restart the computer regularly, at first daily, and then twice daily. Finally, in an effort to sort out the apparent irregularities, I installed Norton SystemWorks. But instead of bringing order to my PC it proved to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

Within a week, the freezes were coming at every other keystroke. I had to resort to the most drastic of measures: I reformatted my hard drive.

I wish I could say that I had backed everything up like a good technology columnist, but that’s easier said than done. I lost a lot of information.

Kinda makes you wonder if there’s some vast conspiracy to prevent your technology from living longer than a year. I can almost picture the key leaders in the technology industry meeting at a supersecret summit on some secluded island every year to discuss ways of enforcing Logan’s Law.

There’s the Dell representative, saying that his hardware is guaranteed to react with Windows ME to expire after a year. The 3Com guy, meanwhile, is brooding in the shadow of a palm tree. But wait, there’s an executive from Intuit, wondering if it’s such a wise thing for financial planning software to collapse after just a year. And here’s someone from Intel, insisting that it’s been done this way for years, and that it’s really for the good of the user, and mumbling something about Moore’s Law.

It’s pure fantasy, of course. But not all that far-fetched. After all, it’s the industry that stands to gain the most from Logan’s Law, not us.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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