Attention to detail impresses me, so I’m continually unimpressed by almost everything. For all the power of free market tiered pricing, it’s almost impossible to buy something that doesn’t have some component built by the lowest bidder. And the lowest bidders are presumably the companies where the idiots work.

For reasons totally beyond my control, I have a silver angle poise lamp here. Several idiots had a say in its construction.

Sturdy Weighted Base! - except the base doesn’t secure to the arm, so if you pick it up by the arm, it comes apart.

60W round lamp (not supplied) - except they actually supplied two, one of them already fitted.

The awkward bayonet fitting (which rotates as you rotate the bulb, so you have to squeeze your fingers down the side to hold it steady) has two positions: bulb screwed in, and bulb almost screwed in. The lamp arrived with a bulb almost screwed in, and so it fell out after about five minutes of standing still. Luckily it didn’t smash. The fitting makes it very easy to think you’ve screwed it in when you haven’t, so I almost don’t blame whoever on the factory floor almost screwed this one in. Bayonet fittings aren’t hard to design or build. It took subtle carelessness and lack of testing to get this one wrong.

Finally, the instructions printed on the side of the box refer to a locking-in-place feature that doesn’t exist. It doesn’t even exist on the picture of the lamp on the front of the box.

It’s not all bad though; the springs make a nice twanging noise and when it comes down to it, the lamp really does produce light. And I don’t think any of its faults were malicious, unlike, say, products from Sony or Microsoft, who make conscious decisions to build annoying products: Memory Stick dependence, upgrade dependence, file format dependence, cable size and shape dependence, charger dependence, and so on… vendor lock-in in general. They can’t lock you into a lamp.