I must be on the wrong side of the product life cycle.  When I like something, the manufacturer eliminates it.

When I find a certain model of a piece of equipment that is perfect for me, it goes away.  Going into a store, I have to purchase a new model of something, a different style or totally different version because the previous one no longer exists.  And, of course, you don’t get all the qualities that made you happy with the one you were using in the past.  This happens far too frequently than chance would seem to dictate.

It’s almost as if we are being forced to let go of our preferences; there is no choice.  Rather than continuing to churn out the tried and true, the current theory says to change it up.  That’s not always the way to go.

Take candy, for example.  If you like something, you want to keep eating it.  That’s the nature of candy.

Chocolate has been around for a long time.  Adding things to it, like peanuts, caramel or coconut are inventions of the modern economy that occurred the past 100 years or so, and fueled our growing addiction to candy bars that include an expanded list of ingredients.

One became a favorite of mine – the Mint Oreo Hershey Bar.   It hung around for a couple of years, maybe three, then it was gone.  Poof.  I fell in love with it.  I purchased it FREQUENTLY. Then it was no longer available on the supermarket shelves.

I went into a brief depression, wondering how such a tasty, face-stuffingly good piece of candy could be eliminated by the manufacturer (ultimately, it was no longer to be found, so it was not even being made).  It is one more example of something you like or find extremely useful being thrown on the scrap heap.

Living in Nebraska , I found a pair of hiking boots that fit my feet like they were hand-made.  They were so superior that I saw another pair in a local store, bought them, and saved them in our clothes closet for over a year.  When the old pair was worn out, I had some newbies ready to go.  Adidas preferred upgrading to a new style and leaving consumers hanging.

Planned obsolescence is part of the grand plan.  We could argue humans have planned obsolescence built into us, so we shouldn’t be surprised when phenomenal candy bars disappear or form fitting hiking boots no longer show up in the sporting goods store.   We all deteriorate at some point.

Televisions, cell phones, cars, bicycles, golf clubs, you name it, you’ll hold onto them if you like how they perform.  Sometimes the new gadget makes sense and you embrace it, like when smart phones overtook your basic cell phone or when HD TV took over analog.  You want that improved product.

When a product formula is successful , it should stay the way it is and keep people happy/satisfied.  For consumers, the change wouldn’t make any sense.  We don’t seem to drive that decision.

I inhale Mini M&M’s, personally keeping the Mars company in business.  Recently, my wife informed me that my consumption was not enough.  I tried upping my purchases, but failed, as it disappeared from the supermarket shelves.  

It seemed like one more personal failure until one day, combing the shelves more closely, it re-emerged miraculously on a different shelf.  They probably just moved it because it was too close to the floor and little kids were opening the bags.

It couldn’t have been because it was selling so well and needed a more prominent location, could it?

Sometimes it’s learning the little things that give you the most joy.  Last week, for example, I learned how to download icons for YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and a blog and attach them to my work signature.  This was amazing.

First, it gave the signature a lot of color, which was really cool.  Your name in a professional setting looks boring, no matter what you do with font size or type to spruce it up. 

More important was the fact that I was able to accomplish this seemingly small task given that I’m a bozo when it comes to Information Technology 101.  Signing things by email now makes me feel good.

One of the reasons this is the case:  When I started walking around the office, asking others how to attach social media icons to our signature, I couldn’t find anyone who did this.  Beyond that, I couldn’t find anyone who even had any idea where to start.

So my efforts had to start from scratch.  Miraculously, a member of our web team surfaced later that day, after I had approached him in the morning.  At that time, he was oblivious about how to help.  When he returned later in the day, he was full of solutions.

He clearly was pleased with himself for figuring it out.  Sharing it with me made him even happier, so I was eager to write down all the steps necessary to ensure not only could I properly download the icons, but could share this information with others. It’s always good to pass a happiness lesson along.

There are a lot of reasons we end up feeling this way.  Part of it is a feeling of accomplishment.  Despite the seemingly small lesson I learned, it was new and meant something significant in a work environment – sharing links to what we do.

There is also an element of creativity to pulling up those images.  All icons aren’t created equal.  You go online and can find a lot of different designs, and so, yipppeeeee, I can personalize the chosen ones.  Not a big deal, but still fun.

The irony, of course, in this situation is that this should be really simple.  And it actually was.  But when I sauntered around the office space asking others about it, no one had ever done it before.

That led to reaching out to others online who should have experience in downloading icons and linking them to your social media tools.  Ironically again, those who should have been the experts didn’t know what to do next.

It’s funny when you think about it:  Who is in charge of the icons?  Go around your place of business and talk to people and see who knows what about this issue.  It would be an interesting enterprise.

In all seriousness, who is in charge?  There isn’t some job title that companies create called, “Icon Downloader” or “Email Signature Project Manager” or “Social Media Link Creator.”

It’s one of those things that falls between the cracks.  Someone is just “expected” to know how to do it.  When you find out who that person is, everyone else learns about that individual’s talent and seeks him or her out for advice, solace and mentoring.  It’s like email distribution lists or finding out who posts something to your internal Web site.  Someone has that institutional memory at every business.

When I finished up capturing the social media icons and slapped my hands together, there was a certain joy in my heart that I hadn’t had for a while.  Perhaps it was because there was a feeling of conquering technology rather than technology conquering me.

It’s a good feeling.  Now I can teach someone else.

A recent discussion led to the question of credit.  Why do we use it?  How the heck did it ever develop?  Who came up with the idea?

These are simple questions. You may consider them odd in 2014 because the use of credit is so fully saturated in the purchasing climate of today’s economy.  One could easily argue the entire world’s economy would collapse without the ability to give someone else a chunk of money with the promise that it will be repaid down the road.

We don’t think about these things that often.  We accept as a given that use of credit card implies we can afford the product or service we’re plunking the plastic down on the counter for.

As people, businesses and governments get further into debt, it’s not so true that everything is affordable and money will be paid back to the lenders (or the entity extending credit) in the coming years.  Many individuals, countries, corporations and different levels of government have gone deeper in debt with borrowing, with some filing for bankruptcy because they got in too far.  The crash of August 2008 was implicitly tied to too much money being loaned out to too many people and organizations that couldn’t pay it back on time.

We borrow and use credit because we can. It’s there.  People extend us money.  As ubiquitous as credit has become, it’s always there, sniffing around, looking for someone new to approach.  So how’d it get started?

Think about the first guy who said, “Okay, I’ll give you five camels , but you have to dig ditches for me for the next two years.  I need a trough from the river to my farm, and trenches to irrigate my fields.  When you finish that, we’ll call it square.”

The ditch digger is giving up two years of his life, so he can get five camels to provide tourist rides and create his own small business.  The problem is, the ditch digger won’t be around to build his business because he’ll be the indentured servant working for the farmer and come home so exhausted each night that he’ll just grunt to his wife and kids, ask for a glass of grog and chow down on some meat mush.

In the meantime, the five flea-laden camels he got in “trade” will grow weaker in that two year period due to lack of care because his wife is busy with the kids, and the kids are too young to feed and groom the newest livestock.  He will sell them back for way less to the guy who initially sold the camels to him.  Maybe he’ll get a goat in return.  So he’s done two years of hard labor – six days a week, 12 hours a day -- for a goat.

Trading has always been and likely always will be about a “fair exchange.”  We are willing to pay something back in the future at an increased rate because the money someone lends to us today (or extends to us through the use of a credit card) looks necessary and like a good deal at the time.  

We look for fair exchanges, but someone benefits more than the other.  That’s just the way it goes. 

Things would be very different in the world if it was always about fair exchanges.  What one person values though, another may not.  One individual is willing to use massive credit to add some swag to his life.  Others want will spend it on experiential living – nice vacations, restaurants or a new sports car.

We go into debt because we want something and don’t have the means to pay for it.  If too many of us put off those purchases, the economy crashes.  So maybe the moral is to borrow one camel first and see how that works out before you go onto the second.

Complicated language makes it more difficult to understand things.  Because of this, we live in a less secure world than we did 30-40 years ago.  Things seemed simpler then because they were.

When technology advances, you must first understand step one of that process before you can begin to understand the next step.  Messages going through wires so you could hear people on a phone thousands of miles away sounded like a euphoric accomplishment when it spread throughout the world. 

How many of us understood though how those voice messages went across all those lines and allowed you to speak over long distances with someone like they were right next to you?  Not very many of us.

Try explaining the concept to someone.  “Uh, oh, your voice goes through this wire and it comes out on the speaker on the other end.”

“You lost me.  How do all those voices go over the wire at the same time, and each one remains separate and distinct?”

Certainly, an engineer could give you the complicated version.  The point is, you have to understand that broad concept to get to the next level of telecommunications, which is wireless, and have even the most miniscule ability to comprehend how that happens and be able to share that with someone else.

So we walk around our lives today using technology that baffles us.  We accept that it works.  We love that it allows us to reach out, but don’t ask us to fix it when something goes wrong, or help someone understand the complex details of its operation.

This is part of the reason so many people are frustrated in the modern world.  They don’t know how the instruments they use actually work.

Similarly, we feel less secure when we are unable to understand the ways people can steal financial data from us or our identities.   The Target retail mess over the holidays is the most visible recent example on how information can be stolen about individuals and then used without their knowledge.  If we could know how this type of data gets stolen, we can prevent it and feel protected.

The iPhone had a recent security scare, and Loop, a Boston-based company, announced that it thought it had a solution.  According to a news account, the company announced a solution, its “LoopWallet app for storing magnetic-stripe cards in encrypted form on a smart phone and then transmitting this information to a standard POS device in a contactless transaction.”  Take a deep breath.  Now breathe.

Okay, now let’s dissect this sentence and see if we can figure it out.  “LoopWallet” is a smart phone application (app).  I think most of us have got this figured except for those living on Planet Claire.

“Magnetic-stripe cards in encrypted form on a smart phone” is a type of card capable of storing data by modifying the magnetism of tiny iron-based magnetic particles on a band of magnetic material on the card.  This gets formatted in a way so no one understands it (encrypted), then stored on the smart phone.

A “standard POS device” is a Point-of-Sale device to take your swiped transaction in a purchasing environment.  Whew, I knew that one and didn’t have to go to Wikipedia. 

“Contactless transactions” are basically credit cards, debit cards, key fobs, smartcards or other devices that use radio-frequency identification for making secure payments. I pretty much knew this one, too, but threw in RIF to confuse you.

Okay, are you now fully befuddled?  How can that be, since everything was just explained?

Here you go.  It means they protect data on your smart phone.  Done.  End of story.

Language is used to make us less secure.  Don’t let it happen.

We love our fantasies.  We all live in our heads, conjuring, dreaming, creating new worlds, reliving things that happened years ago.  It’s natural.

Part of the reason we don’t dwell in reality is because work dwells there.  That takes up a huge chunk of time during each day.  It tires us out, stresses certain people, and puts many in a frame of mind to escape.

This makes fertile ground for the businesses that cater to fantasy, which can be defined way more broadly you might think.  Most of us would say a fantasy is about something we hope makes us happy, but the odds are against it.  We fantasize, making ourselves feel better, getting pleasure from something that will never occur.

But fantasies go deeper than that.  Any time we are delving into something that triggers the happiness sensors and sends images and thoughts to our brains can be considered a fantasy.  We’re thinking about something and it’s not specifically the activity we are engaged in.  So we are fantasizing.

If you accept that definition, we work to escape.   Yes, we commute to our jobs, put in our time, have our moments of joy and accomplishment, and stay focused for extended periods of time, but we are also thinking about what we will have for lunch, taking the dogs for an enjoyable walk or the book we want to read when we get home.  Those are our daydreams in the 8-5 world.

Take the boring meeting, for example.  Are you fantasizing in there?  Do you enter the room with a razor focus to listen intently to everything said, provide spectacular input and field questions ?  Or do you fade away, watching the speaker’s lips flap while you stifle a yawn and relive that fishing trip you took when you were 12?

We also pretend about things going on right in front of our faces.  We choose not to face what is really going on.

An example of this is parents who watch their kids participate in athletics.  If your son plays baseball and only nine get on the field at one time, then players 10-16 on the roster have been deemed substitutes and are less likely to see action.

Though that is a coach’s decision and we can all disagree with coaches (witness TV sports shows, and talking sports heads on radio), at some point parents have to recognize their kid plays at a certain level that either gets him or her on the field or continuing to ride the bench.  You can keep pretending he is better than some other player, but usually if you ask around and face reality, the kid who is playing ahead of him is better.

It’s hard.   I know, I’ve been there, just like any parent who has a child participating in athletics.  We can spend our time fantasizing or accepting reality.  So we spin our dreams.

We escape into movies, books, sports, music, and television to give ourselves pleasure, of course.  But they are also venues that engage our creative impulse to escape from the grind of our day-to-day rituals.

Many people are disillusioned these days.  I would submit a large part of that is because their fantasy world doesn’t fit their reality.  They imagine the way they want things to be, and when the pre-conditioned and unrealistic vision is not realized, they grow frustrated.

It is easy to see this, but much harder to rectify.  And we all fall prey to the impulse.

For what it’s worth, my two cents is to exercise control over those things in life you can do something about.  Put in the extra effort.  Help your kids.  Recognize many things won’t turn out “your” way.

If that still doesn’t work out, then let your fantasies run wild.