Things that just won't die

Have you noticed how things being made today just don't seem to last like "they used to make them"? I find that products seem to understand their warranty and fail just after it expires. Sometimes you run across the exceptions.

Back in January, Barbie Reid came out to visit us and do some skiing. Unfortunately she tore her ACL on the mountain. She got home, eventually had surgery and is now mending well. Not long after getting home, she sent us a "thank you for my visit and for ruining my knee" gift, a nice white lily. We water the plant about once a month if we remember. In response to all this love and attention, it has bloomed nonstop since we got it. This is going on 7 months!



I buy the dog cheap toys. One way to find them cheap is to get them off season, like Halloween pumpkin toys in December. Instead of having the traditional squeaker, this has an electronic voice that when squeezed says "Trick or Treat". We are at two and a half years and this $5 toy still talks.



And finally, before we started Ganymede Software, John Walker and I managed a group of people doing technical marketing for two of IBM's networking technologies: APPC and APPN. We made some marketing giveaways for conferences, including the luggage tag you see below. The technologies are now either dead or at least meaningless, but this luggage tag from about 1993 is still traveling the world!



I wish there was a much longer list of things that last incredibly well, but that just doesn't seem to be the case.