Ask HN: How has bad technology impacted your life?

A few hours ago I missed a call from a woman I was once very passionately in love with. My first instinct was send her an SMS message, "long time no see". I texted her! The woman who made my heart skip a beat every time I thought about her in 1997. We regularly spent 6-8 hours per night on the phone if we weren't with each other in person.

Relying on Apple's iPhon 3G in San Francisco on AT&T's hideous service has trained into me an expectation that phone-calls are painful and to avoid them. I would have gotten a land-line, but Apple has managed to make me hate telephony, so I don't even bother.

Thinking through this a bit more, Apple isn't the only company who has managed to make me hate the entire core user experience of their product.

What other companies have done this to us?

Here are some of the notable examples I'm coming up with right now.

- Volkswagen, with it's 1999 Jetta, turned me into a - Firefox trained me to write all responses in VIM and then paste them into a textbox (even this one) - Adobe Flash has trained me to bookmark every website I go to that I haven't read yet as it consistently crashes all multi-tabbed browsers - Linux trained me to over-build redundancy into network architectures