I'm having a breakdown as all my gadgets conk out at once

4:11pm Friday 16th November 2007

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MAYBE it's the electro-magnetic field surrounding my body, but suddenly everything around me is breaking down.

The little fridge in our kitchen, the washing machine and the microwave have all conked out without warning. Now the big fridge is on the wane and the DVD player is refusing to work.

There's also been a furious leak coming from the tank in the attic and the upstairs toilet doesn't flush any longer.

Amazingly, this has all happened in the last couple of weeks.

Now, before you say it's conicidence, I have a different theory - things just ain't built the way they used to be.

We live in a hi-tech age where nothing should ever really break down.

You've seen it with cars. When I got my licence 25 years ago, I was on first-name terms with the RAC recovery chap. On one famous night, I tried going to a disco with two friends in the rain.

In succession, all three of our cars stopped working when they were driven through puddles. My dad had to take us all in the end in his van. Hardly good for my street cred at the time.

However, these days, most cars seem to go on forever without ever breaking down. The technology is so good that modern motors have become tremendously reliable.

Sadly, this doesn't translate to the world of kitchen appliances. Our first microwave lasted 15 years. The second barely made it past two before we had to chuck it out.

It's a similar story for the washer dryer. We bought it at the same time as the last microwave and were thrilled by its digital display and its apparent efficiency.

I had so much confidence in it that I didn't bother to pay for an extension of its warranty after two years. More fool me, because as soon as the guarantee lapsed, it began playing up and stopping intermittently.

So we've just had to pay £145 for a repair man to look at it and for the warranty to be extended for another year.

It was either that or sling it out.

There's a similar tale of woe with the big fridge. It's only a few years old but all its freezer drawers have broken.

We already replaced one at a cost of around £25 so we either have to live with the situation, pay a fortune for new drawers that are only going to snap again, or give up and buy a new one.

The broken trays prevent the freezer door from closing properly and cause the fridge alarm to sound off inexplicably in the middle of the night.

So I'm not only being kept awake by the expense of it all, but am being roused from my sleep by a fridge's siren.

The only happy note in this all is that I took out a plumbing and drainage policy a few years ago. I was going to ditch it because of the cost, but I've suddenly found myself using it on a regular basis - and have been enjoying free call-outs.

We no longer need a social life because we're always busy inviting repair men into our home.

Of course, broken appliances are all part of life's rich tapestry, but I am positive household goods are becoming less reliable. Is this because they are cheaper and more disposable, has the workmanship become shoddier, or is there more to go wrong with the technology?

The final straw came with the DVD player/recorder. I bought a video recorder almost 30 years ago when I lived at home with my parents, and it never broke down, it always recorded when I asked it to and it was simple to use.

I swear you need to go on a training course before you can operate the DVD contraption. It's fiddly and completely unreliable.

On Monday, it taped two Coronation Street episodes correctly and then refused to play them because the disc corrupted on the DVD player - although it worked on my PC.

It was just too much for me and I requested that Mrs Editor's Chair threw it in the bin and we reverted to the VCR.

Maybe it's just that I'm getting old - or maybe the world has lost sight of basic reliability in favour of gleaming new fancy technology.