BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY: My dumb furnace boldly goes where smart appliances fail

As a writer, I’m supposed to tell you about how fantastic and gee-whiz dazzling all our new gadgets are. As readers, you’re supposed to leave comments saying things like, “I just can’t imagine how we ever got along doing business before I could use a tiny pocket computer to pay my bills, turn my air conditioning on, and check the milk in the fridge!”

Nah.

When Captain Kirk congratulates him on his handiwork, Scotty grins and says, 'The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.'

Modern technology is baloney. It’s overly complicated. It depends on too many computer programs and apps; there are too many digital “providers” in the pipeline of what used to be simple transactions.

Take a walk with me as I do battle in two different theaters — the real analog world and the fake virtual version. One battle is satisfying. The other makes me want to ignore the government safety warnings on my mop bucket and insert my head in the water.

First, I attempt something I have done hundreds of times before: log into my small company's bank account and pay a freelancer. Then I tackle something I know considerably less about: repairing a broken gas furnace. Guess which one takes longer?

Pay mal

Nothing will convince you of how bad modern tech is better than trying to do the banking you have done all your life.

Every month I update the books for the small company I co-own with my friend and business partner. Together we put out "Disaffected," a weekly cultural commentary show. We hire freelancers to do work for us like cutting up clips of shows for short-form video. Part of my bookkeeping is paying these freelancers through the bank.

I log into National Bank. Or I think I do. After entering my username and password, the screen is hijacked by a never-before-seen display telling me to stop what I’m doing and follow its instructions. I do mean “told,” too. No please, no thank you. A series of imperative commands that read like this:

1. Gather your government identification and be prepared to take a selfie.
2. Open your phone (reader, I’m on a stationary computer) and tap the icon displayed on your screen to confirm your identity.
3. Follow the instructions on your phone to photograph your government identification. Photograph the front and the back.
4. Follow the prompt on your phone to take a selfie.
5. Wait for your identity to be verified by AI.

Being ordered to comply with a brand-new set of steps without even the pretense of “asking” already has me irritated.

Tech tyranny

Worse, National Bank does not tell me the reason for any of this. I find out at the end that National Bank has kept this secret because it is forcing me to do something it knows I would refuse to do unless compelled to: “set up a passkey.” Passkeys are the latest must-have “security” feature because apparently mere passwords aren’t good enough.

Yes, I know. There’s some very good reason for this, I will be assured. I don’t care.

I spend two and a half hours trying to comply with the commands National Bank is giving me on my computer screen and also the orders it is giving me on my phone. You have to have at least two computers on your person at all times now in order to be allowed to transact business.

The phone contradicts the computer screen. The interface changes the terminology it uses randomly, leaving me confused about what function I’m agreeing to. Though I follow all the steps to the letter, it takes five attempts at “taking a selfie” for the AI to process the transaction. And every time it fails? It erases all my progress and sends me back to the very beginning to do each step all over again, in sequence.

All I’m trying to do is pay a $200 freelancer fee and enter a note in my checking account. Two and a half hours. I could do this in three minutes with a pen, a check, an envelope, and one handwritten line in a ledger. No, I do not think the ability to do this electronically brings me a benefit big enough to justify this digital Tower of Babel.

This is almost everything now, everywhere, all the time. In my town you can’t even park on the street without downloading an app and using your fingers on a teensy little touch screen to enter a credit card.

Back to the Before Times

Contrast this with repairing a broken gas furnace. The furnace is a 35-year-old unit that is built rugged and requires no electricity (except for the fan that circulates the hot air), a must in a rural area that gets frequent blackouts in winter storms. But the automatic fan isn’t running automatically.

My handy sister and I look up the model and talk to an AI (this is something they’re actually good for) to figure out the problem. I buy what I think is an old-fashioned analog thermostat. It seems likely the old one has gone bad.

The new thermostat looks just like the simple mechanical kind I remember. But it's an imposter — a modern piece of tech in analog "drag." Flip it over and it's full of electronic circuitry.

And it doesn’t work. Why? Because it is designed for a 24-volt control system, while my furnace uses a millivolt system.

OK, time to pivot. I put back the old thermostat, but change out the copper wire connections. Success! It kicks the main burner on. But the fan is still running constantly instead of cycling with the heat.

Hands on

The AI (Claude) says the problem is most likely a faulty fan-limiter switch. Here’s the part where it gets fun. This is an analog switch. That means it is made out of physical material that responds to the environment in ways that you can see, touch, and intuit.

We order the new switch from a mom-and-pop stove company for $11. The simplicity is the beauty. It’s just a palm-sized device with a very thin convex metal disk; it looks like an opaque copper contact lens. It works by flexing one way or the other depending on whether the furnace is firing and heating up the disk or shutting off so that the disk cools and flexes in the opposite direction. This flexing opens and closes the electrical circuit that runs the fan.

We put the switch in and turn on the furnace with the old analog thermostat, and it works like a dream. The fan goes on and off automatically, just as it should. This furnace does not do anything “less” than the most expensive modern digital appliance on the market today. It just does the job simply with parts that humans can put in themselves and make sense of.

That’s the reason I avoid a $300 service call from an HVAC company — the kind of service call I would dread even more with a computerized furnace.

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Robert Alexander/Getty Images

Scotty knew

Chief engineer of the starship Enterprise Montgomery Scott sums the problem up in the 1984 motion picture "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock."

Captain Kirk and crew need to steal the battle-damaged Enterprise to rescue Spock when Starfleet won’t allow them to do it. The problem? They’ll be outrun by the latest high-tech starship Excelsior, equipped with super-duper-even-faster “transwarp” drive.

Scotty pulls a couple of key chips out of the Excelsior’s guts, leaving it dead in space so that the Enterprise can get away. When Captain Kirk congratulates him on his handiwork, Scotty grins and says, “The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.”

We have overthought the plumbing in modern devices. It’s not that digital technology is “bad.” It’s that we’re using it stupidly. Remember the recent story about Samsung “smart” refrigerators turning into expensive bricks because of an internet-based software problem?

If you didn’t live in 2026 with me, you would say I was lying because it’s so absurd. In South Korea, some of Samsung’s high-end refrigerators with built-in “smart” wireless technology shut down and stopped cooling because of a bad software update.

So long as we keep buying these jacked-up robots, companies are going to keep making appliances more complicated, less repairable, and less reliable. Will we wise up? Maybe. I have two friends who go feral with excitement over every new product Google or Apple puts out. They immediately install “smart bulbs” in every lamp of their houses as soon as they’re available.

One year later? Both friends rip them out in frustration after realizing that an “on/off” switch works better than training an AI to understand “turn on the living room light and only the living room light.”

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