You know, I’ve had quite a journey with my issues with rage in my life. Through therapy and a lot of work and introspection, I’ve conquered them. Explosions of sudden anger are no longer a part of my life.

But let me tell you, if there’s anything that drives me back down that road of rage, it’s shit not working.

I always take precautions with my gear, making sure I have extra cables, batteries, adapters, lots of redundancy. So it’s not like I set myself up for failure. But sometimes, things just don’t cooperate. In those moments, I am tested.

Windows 10 notoriously lags when you have a lot of network drives mapped. Of course, I HAVE to have them mapped for work, so I’m stuck. And I never know if it’s going to work, or it’s going to lag and make me wait to see the folder. It sometimes takes more than a minute for it to respond. In those moments, I am tested.

We use a great system for our in-ear monitoring that generally works perfectly. Except when the iPhone (or perhaps the app) decides it doesn’t know how to handle the fact that there’s a wireless network I’m attached to that doesn’t have internet access, and makes my mixer disappear right in the middle of needing to change a setting in my in-ear mix. In those moments, I am tested.

I’ve never gigged with my Les Paul because it’s always had a wonky pickup selector – it’s like if you breathe on it wrong, the pickup you’ve selected doesn’t work. I even changed it out and got precisely the same result. So now I have to run it in the middle position all the time and just adjust the volumes of the two pickups to pick what sort of tone I want out of it. But if I bump the switch, I lose a pickup. In those moments, I am tested. I’ve often thought of completely rewiring that guitar just because it seems like it might be good to start over. Of course, since it’s never been a primary gigging guitar, the priority is low, and even though I do love playing it, I’ve never been able to justify the expense.

My original and very nice guitar, a 1990 Fender HM Strat Ultra, has had a messed-up output jack for over 20 years. It’s also a guitar with a Kahler Licensed Floyd Rose trem system with a locking nut. Between the sketchiness of using a Floyd with a locking nut and merely moving an inch and losing signal if the cable shifts in the output jack wrong, the guitar has never been a major part of my gigging life. I played it in the college days because it was all I had, but the output jack worked, and the trem seemed less temperamental for some reason. Probably just my lack of tuning perception. I try to play it at home a lot now, because I do love the way it plays – it’s a total shred machine – but if you move wrong…BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. In those moments, I am tested.

One of my favorite basses is a 2003 Ibanez BTB515 with Bartolini pickups. It’s a monster with the best B string of any 5-string I’ve ever played…but it has a wonky volume knob, so if you don’t get it set just right, the pickups sound super weird, almost as if you have a high pass filter on them. Not exactly the best thing for a bass. Turn up the volume too much, and you lose all the bass’ booty. In those moments, I am tested.

I guess operating as someone that usually sets himself up for success, preparing, planning, making sure I have everything I need in case of a catastrophe, it feels unfair to me when things don’t work. And it’s so frequently little things like laggy software or a wonky pickup selector, tremolo system, volume knob, or output jack. Small things have always been the biggest triggers for my rage – in large-scale meltdowns, I’m incredibly calm. In fact, it almost makes me calmer.

So, if it’s not too much to ask, universe, can things just work, please? I really don’t enjoy seeing red, and you’re really pushing me in that direction every time you unleash some digital or analog gremlin on me when I just need to get some work done.

And before anyone mentions it – yes, I realize that I need to fix the things I described before that are broken. But the point is they never should have broken in the first place. They didn’t break after a long time or a lot of wear – they just decided to stop working all that well one day. I’m likely to fix the Ibanez and gut the Les Paul (probably convert it to FilterTrons or maybe go crazy and get some P-Rails and have lots of tonal options) – but I’m not sure how easy it is to find the right sort of output jack to use with my HM Strat Ultra (it’s one of those barrel types). And the software issues? Well, that’s probably not something I can fix, so I just have to cope better.

Perhaps you have had the same sort of frustrations – probably without the underlying rage/anger issues threatening to send you off the deep end – if so, hit me up with a comment about your technological pet peeves or some piece of gear that just manages to fail you, however inconsistently.

Thanks for reading, and peace be the journey (a mantra for this particular topic…).
TMS