You know that ‘lifetime guarantee’ you offered me? Apparently I died already

May I have a replacement, please?

“Sir? You have only just bought it.”

Yes. But it’s broken. I would like it replaced.

“I don’t understand, sir. This is the checkout. You have just now paid for the goods. You haven’t even left the shop.”

Well I thought I’d save time having to bring it back later.

Welcome to my personal retail world. Whatever I buy, it’ll be cracked, snapped, shattered, loose, poorly connected, scratched, dented, incomplete or otherwise faulty, failed or fabulously fucked up. Then I have to spend days or weeks to arrange its repair or replacement.

It is inevitable that manufactured goods can slip through factory quality checks or undergo damage in transit. It is my curse to be the unlucky sod who ends up buying them. This is no shot in the dark: I’m talking with absolute certainty. I don’t need to ask permission to unseal the box so I can look inside. I already know it’ll be the one that’s knackered.

I have tried taking a product to the checkout, then at the last minute change my mind, dash back down the aisle, switch it for an identical alternative and walk back smugly believing I have tricked fate. All that happens is that I will have returned a working product to its location on the shelf and picked up the faulty one instead.

Carting the crap home only to have to cart it all the way back again seems inefficient. I may as well pay for my goods and ask for an immediate refund while I’m still standing at the till.

Besides, staff at a shop’s checkout are generally better humoured than those behind the Returns and Exchanges desk. The latter are trained to be suspicious; I think some of them may be ex-Mossad. That whole business of guaranteeing to repair or exchange your faulty goods is just a front. Their real job is to teach you a darn good lesson.

• You bought a music CD and the inner jewel case is crushed? Oh what bad luck, sir, it was the last one in the shop. Can I interest you in the same album on scratched vinyl?

• Your Dr Marten’s are leaking and you want to claim on the lifetime guarantee? I’m sorry, sir, but it appears that you have been walking in them. That’s wear and tear, sir. Not covered.

• The first time you switched on your personal DeLonghi coffee-maker it showered your kitchen with a spectacular fountain of water, did it sir? Oh no no no, we can’t exchange it for another. Yes, sir, I know there are another 50 of them in the small appliances aisle behind me but this is our policy. We will send it back to DeLonghi, who will play football with the box for a while before eventually determining that one of its engineers forgot to connect a water pipe inside competently, and five months later return your amateurishly bodged unit back to us in its now-brutalised original box, having stolen several of the accessories and gouged a scratch into the front of the unit to remind you who you’re dealing with, pal.

And don’t get me started on ‘lifetime guarantees’. The two things you can guarantee about lifetime guarantees is that (a) they do not last a lifetime, and (b) therefore equate to offering no guarantee at all. Just you try claiming on one and you will discover a third guarantee: the certainty that you will end up ensconced in an existential debate around the topic ‘What is Life?’

My cat used to be the subject of pet insurance which claimed to offer a ‘lifetime guarantee’. I assumed this meant the lifetime of the cat until, having thought about it, realised this was too obvious to make sense. I mean, you wouldn’t insure a dead cat, would you? Further checks revealed that it meant the lifetime of my monthly instalments.

Surreal though it may seem, this means my cat’s lifetime policy depended upon me staying alive. And if I ever had the temerity to make a claim, such as for vet’s fees, the ‘lifetime’ promise would end. I suppose by this they mean they would send someone round to shoot my cat. Or me.

I’ve often suspected private health insurance works the same way: you can only claim if you stay healthy. As soon as you fall ill, you’re no longer covered.

In most cases, ‘lifetime’ guarantees apply for a nominal projected duration of a product’s full integrity before natural decay (as opposed to rough treatment) takes it beyond saving. For example, a ‘lifetime’ for flat roofs and double glazing tends to be in the order of 10 years. Apparently Ikea’s lifetime guarantee on certain large furniture and fitted kitchen items extends to 25 years, which sounds pretty good. I wonder if any middle-aged Swedish couples have ever tried to claim, standing at the Returns desk while rubbing their sore backsides and waving a faded monospaced dot-matrix receipt with its perforated tractor holes still intact.

It’s a bit naughty but some organisations imply they’re offering you a lifetime service guarantee, only to cut it short at a moment’s notice when they get bored of their own magnanimity. Big Tech does this a lot. A while back, Apple promoted its Mac-dot-com adjunct to the Mac OS as "free email for life!" It was good because it came with loads of storage space for backups, uploads and attachments. A year or so later, it was downgraded to email-plus-fuck-all-storage unless you purchased an upgrade. Did they mean it was free email for the life of the Mac employee who made the announcement? I guess he died.

Google just this week messaged all its registered customers to say its free unlimited photo and video storage will, from 1 June 2021, be subject to a limit of 15GB for top-resolution files unless they subscribe to one of several upgrade plans. This means if you don’t pay, the service is no longer unlimited; if you do pay, it’s neither unlimited nor free.

HP took another questionable road of customer disservice recently by axing the free plan for its Instant Ink supplies. Instant Ink is a subscription service for buying ink cartridges, and there is a hard sell to enrol on the basic (free) plan when you buy a new home inkjet printer. If you print out no more than a few sheets a week, the cartridges are sent to you for free. How can you resist? Free ink for life!

No, not your life. Not even the life of the printer. HP meant the theoretical lifetime of being arsed to keep the offer going. Now it is trying to suggest the basic plan was an introductory offer, even though none of the documentation I have for my HP Instant Ink contract makes this clear.

You could argue that we have been lucky to enjoy free photo storage and free inkjet refills while we had the chance. So what if we got loads of stuff for free and now we have to start paying our way? It seems churlish to complain. OK, but have you noticed that when drug dealers do this, everyone gets terribly cross about it?

So much for Big Tech. Much, much worse is Small Tech. Ask anyone who purchased a Pebble wristwatch, only to end up with a gadget about as much use as an actual pebble strapped to their arm after ongoing support for the watches was ditched when Fitbit bought the company. Wearable gadgets, IoT devices and tech-startup products are particularly vulnerable to short active lifetimes, as their once-eager manufacturers lose interest, go out of business or get taken over.

So if you have a smart lightbulb, make sure you set it to a sensible colour before switching it off at night. By morning, the supplier may be out of business and its app certifications revoked, leaving you with a lightbulb set to medallion-man crimson for the remainder of its active lifetime – however short or long that may be. Buying an IoT gadget will always be a shot in the dark.

Ah, I’ve just received confirmation that the visitor shop at my local nuclear power plant remains open during the lockdown. So typical of me: I bought some plutonium 238 from them last week but when I opened the box at home I discovered that its atom had already split.

I’m going to ask them to exchange it for plutonium 239: its half-lifetime guarantee is longer.

ALISTAIR DABBS is a freelance technology tart, juggling tech journalism, training and digital publishing. Given his poor luck when buying things in shops, imagine his terror when ordering stuff online. More from me in Something for the Weekend, Sir? every Friday at The Register.