Why do we tolerate failures all the time in our electronics? (IE the actual email I just sent to Hulu because that company cannot get its act together and simply show me my television shows.)

UPDATE: About 30 minutes after I posted this/emailed them, I got the credit for a month. WOO HOO.


I've said it before and now I will say it again: we put up with a failure/error rate in our computerized stuff that is astonishing.  I bet electronics fail 20% of the time. TWENTY PERCENT. If your car failed twenty percent of the time you would be dead before you could read this. If your house failed 20% of the time you would live in a cave.  

"But Briane electronics are complicated," people say.  Weirdo perverts like Louis CK say we should just be grateful they work at all.  Well, Louis CK The Molester/other people who defend the deplorable state of consumer eletronics: IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY.  Computers can work right 99.9% of the time.  Do you think NASA's computers fail 1/5 of the time? I doubt it.  Obviously we can make a computer that can do something like stream the television show I am paying you to stream, but we DON'T, and that is why I am frustrated.

And that is the lead-in to the email I just sent Hulu. It had to be written as if I were Sweetie because our Hulu account is under her gmail.  I tried to lighten it up a bit because when I get this annoyed if I don't try to find some humor I get really mean.

The email:

Dear Hulu,
Today, I tried to sit down and watch an episode of "Brooklyn 99" with my husband. We were trying to take a brief break from an otherwise busy day and had about 1/2 hour to do so. 

We made it about 1/3 of the way through the program when that idiotic commercial with the thick bacon came on.  First off, this commercial is stupid and people who go crazy over bacon are stupid.  Secondly, this commercial is also dumb because it shows 10 seconds of a bacon commercial with two freaky looking strips of dried pig flesh talking about their body image, and then 'invites' me to 'learn what happened' by clicking to some other website. WHO WOULD WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED? These slices of bacon, and apparently bacon is female?, are barely introduced to us, and I have no emotional investment in their dilemma.  Perhaps with a bit more plot development or characterization I might care, but as it is, the commercial is simply annoyingly coy about this and it bothers me that they are attempting to divert my attention from Andy Samberg's show.

As if that were not bad enough, the commercial kept jamming up the computer; as soon as it ended, I got that screen that says Hulu is unable to show ads on my computer.  This is obviously false because I just watched an ad, if you could call it that because it was so bad.

This happened four times in a row until we had to give up on the commercial.  So much for our fun lunch! I would like you to remove the ad and also give me a free month's worth of subscription by giving me $8.  I will send you my paypal address to do so.

Thank you,

This won't end happily for Hulu.  I'm getting that eight bucks. And THAT will teach them not to mess with ME.