"Dan you muppet, why did you buy a water heater that uses an app"

Well a couple years ago my roof started leaking

I called out the going-up-ladders people because there's only so many different types of danger my spouse will let me get into, given how many people she knows who've fallen off them. The ladder people tell me alright you've got some shingles damaged and some flashing leaking, that's no big deal, but the mid deal is that my chimney's so badly knackered that it's way beyond a simple slap-some-mortar-in job, there's several courses of bricks unaccounted for, I go "Oh aye I did find some underneath my window," the chimney was bollocksed is the headline, and it was gonna cost a LOT of money to fix it.

It was gonna cost so much money, in fact, that it'd be cheaper to remove the need for a chimney in the first place. The only thing left in the house that still used the chimney was the 20-odd-year-old gas water heater. I figured that thing was probably getting ready to rupture anyway so hell, heat pump water heater time.

So I order this inside-out-fridge contraption from a company called RHEEM, also known as RUUD, and yes I very much am naming and shaming this company, and after going back and forth to the hardware store eight times I was on first name terms with the lady in the plumbing aisle and the proud owner of a new 240v line and a machine that makes my water hot by making my basement cold.

And there was a QR code on the side and a thing saying Download The Econet App! and I said "Pfft no" and if all went sensibly that should have been the end of it

Things didn't go sensibly because an unrelated series of events did not go sensibly a few years before, and now I have a couch that reclines in such a way that my head enters an adjacent room.

Why do I recline into the next room over? For the same reason I had to build a four inch wide coffee table. Don't ask me questions about that today. The important part is that when I settle down at night with a glass of whiskey and some Star Trek, I press a button and lean my head back into a void in a rack that sits in my workshop, which is where this water heater lives, and the water heater, being a fridge, goes BRRRRRRRR

It occurred to me at some point that if I had the app, I could tell this water heater Dude, it's ten o'clock at night, there's no need to be actively making more hot water right now, be quiet.

So I scanned the barcode and downloaded the app, which didn't work.

In fairness to Rheem, the way the app didn't work WAS pretty funny. See, it made you register with them before you could schedule your water heater. So first it'd ask you what username you wanted.

I'm not gonna tell you my Rheem username, you'll have to wait for the inevitable data breach for that, so let's say it was ifixcoinops. So you tap the box (you have to do this on a phone, you can't register in a browser) and you tap the letter i on the keyboard and a little i pops up on the screen, quite clever really, then you press the f and the text hole has iif in it. Hmm. Alright well the next letter in "ifixcoinops" is another i, let's press the i on my keyboard, the text hole now says iififi.

Which is slightly unconventional, but okay, let's see where this is going, iifiifiiififiifix. So I introduce myself as mister iififiifixifixcifixcoifixcoiifixcoinifixcoinoifixcoinopifixcoinops, and it tells me there's not enough digits in my phone number

Now I'm vaguely aware on some level that an awful lot of android apps are just a web browser with no clothes on, and that's certainly what this feels like, and buddy lemme tell you, HTML wants to work. It takes concerted, dedicated effort to make something fail this hard. Like, you've gotta code up some truly trollish javascript to make that kinda thing happen. So I guess hats off to Rheem.

Did I mention there wasn't even a place to put my phone number