A fly got in the house today. Normally, the screens on the windows keep them out, but this guy must have snuck in when I went to take the garbage out. They don’t bother me all that much, but they drive my wife nuts, so I grabbed the flyswatter after I trapped the critter in my man cave. The fly kept on going to the open window, where the light was, so when it stopped to rest on the glass I bashed him.

But he got away. The flyswatter wasn’t working. No, it wasn’t my speed or reflexes, it was the flyswatter itself. The handle was too flexible, and the business end either had too much inertia or too much air resistance. It took it a split second to start moving and I couldn’t coordinate the flick of my wrist with the motion of the swat. The handle simply wasn’t stiff enough, and there was a time lag between the time I struck and the swat started moving. The fly got away in the gap.

I studied the swatter for awhile; believe me, I know how flyswatters work, I’ve used them for years and I am quite familiar with their operation. Sure enough, the plastic handle was just too flexible, and the plastic rectangle at the other end was too heavy or too light, when you flicked it the action was all wrong, as the handle whipped the inertia of the swat prevented it from accelerating for just a split second, just long enough to unbalance the stroke. You could see the handle was just bending too much, not transferring enough force, fast enough, to the other end. Solving the problem was instinctual, just grab the handle in the middle instead of the end; it cuts down your range substantially so you have to get much closer to the fly, but it restores the rhythm. I got the little bugger in mid-air. So much for my speed or my reflexes not being up to par.

I recalled my wife complaining some time back about the “fly swatter not working”, and now I knew what she meant. But it got me to thinking about the flyswatter itself, the technology involved. Yeah, I know, the implement is definitely low-tech, but this was a two-piece plastic flyswatter, a white plastic handle and an orange warhead attached to it, holes cut into its surface in decorative geometrical patterns to reduce air resistance. No doubt there is a factory in China or Indonesia where hundreds of thousands of these gadgets are cranked out every day. Then comes the great transport activity that ships these across the ocean, and the huge marketing machine that distributes them throughout the country to a Wal-Mart near me. When I was a kid, flyswatter handles were made of twisted wire (like coathanger thickness) with a wire mesh swatting surface
weighted down with a stiff wire border so it had just the right weight. They always worked, they were foolproof, their operation was instinctive and required no thought or prior training. There was absolutely no way you could fuck them up.

But the modern flyswatter, with its high tech materials and construction, its world-wide distribution and sophisticated marketing, DOES NOT WORK! Think about it, modern technology and organization cannot make a decent flyswatter. Not only that, there is no feedback from the consumer to the producer to diagnose its faults and inform the factory to make the appropriate adjustments. And in spite of all the fancy plastic extrusion and molding equipment that had to be designed and implemented to create these items, no one ever actually tried using one. You don’t need to be a product design engineer to know the goddam thing doesn’t work.

I’m not quite sure what all that means, but I think we’re in deep shit trouble.