Coincidence

A long time ago (in the early 1960s I think) I read a book in which some of the plot centred around a "subversive dictionary", and what were supposed to be entries from said tome appeared at the top of each chapter. I mention that because one of those definitions has stayed with me. It defines "Coincidence" as "You didn't know the other side of what was happening." and of course it can be considered subversive in that it discourages anyone who takes it seriouslyfrom accepting that what they are seeing is a matter of chance until/unless they have exhausted all other possibilities.

This principle has stayed with me, and I have to say that it has served me well in many different contexts. When, for example, anything complicated is malfunctioning, then a clue to the cause can usually be found by questioning any part of the situation that looks at all coincidental even if there is no obvious connection between the coincidence and the fault.

Another key idea is what the cognoscenti would call "Statistical Significance".

If I were to toss a coin three times and get three tails, then that would be a fluke, but it would not be cause for any suspicion, but if I tossed that coin three hundred times and got three hundred heads then I think most people would show some curiosity about the coin itself or how I was tossing it, rather than thinking of what had happened as coincidence. The more times something happens, the more likely it is that there will an explanation other than pure fluke (though whether one can find the real explanation may be another matter of course.)

All of this has come to mind as I have been thinking about purchases that J has made in recent months, to wit:

One Dell Laptop
A Digital Camera
Another Dell Laptop (to replace the first)
An official, non-pirated copy of Photoshop
A Potters Wheel from one of the market leaders in that field

Each of these has been purchased brand new and each has cost some hundreds of pounds (They are also the only purchases she has made in that time-frame.)

The reason I mention that list in a post about Coincidence is that not one of them was fully usable when received by J.

The first Dell laptop produced fault after fault over a period of nearly 12 months before Dell eventually agreed to a refund

The camera is at this moment still back with the manufacturers because of a fault with its flash mechanism

The second Dell laptop, was purchased with the refund from the first, and has had to have a change of hard-disk

Photoshop as supplied has turned out to include known problems with some editions of Windows XP, such that the software would not actually load. Details of what to do about this were (apparently) to be found in the Help-file but were not accessible until loading was complete (Catch-22) and no mention of the problem appeared on packaging etc.

The Potters Wheel was supplied with a crucial screw inadequately tightened, so that it ran unevenly which made it useless. A phone call to the supplier elicited an immediate suggestion of what to check and what to do about it (which then took only a couple of minutes to fix) but why wasn't it checked before it was despatched?

Five large purchases, each from an apparently reputable supplier, and all five of them with unexpectedly serious shortcomings. Is that coincidence, or is it indicative of something that is happening to design and/or production standards generally? How common must such faults be?

We hear an awful lot nowadays about how fast technology is advancing. I wonder how long it will take until "the trade" begins to rediscover the importance of good honest quality, or their customers wake up enough to demand it. What would happen if a supplier were to advertise that they would not be even trying to be at the front of the race towards the "most advanced" product, but would only market products that were 100% tested and reliable (and apply that same philosophy to any neww version of said product that they would ever introduce.)

I find it particularly galling, for example, that a version of Photoshop that I could have bought 5 years ago would have been 100% straightfrward but that has been ruined by "improvements" made since. Why can we not have the choice of buying the reliable (back-number) version of the software ? They don't like "piracy", but at the moment (paradoxically) it would take a pirate to supply goods of adequate quality.