For those who don’t speak Latin, Tech Gratia Technis is a play on words of MGM Studios’ slogan, Ars Gratia Artis, “Art for art’s sake”. Yes, I made the term up, and it refers to technology that is applied for no reason other than to apply technology.

My car is getting old. It has a few quirks with the driver-side door that are manageable by themselves, but there are some additional things that Chevrolet decided needed to be there, and while I understand some, I don’t understand others.

A very nice thing that it does is that if it detects that you have locked all of the doors, and the keys are in the ignition, and the driver side door is open, and then you close the driver side door, it will unlock all of the doors so that you don’t lock yourself out. I’m good with that.

On the other hand, this morning, I had to argue with the door. I got in, nudged the lock button on my way in, locking the doors, put the keys in, realized I had forgotten something, hit the unlock button and got… nothing. I hit lock, and it locked. I hit unlock again and got nothing. I turned the key on, hit unlock and it unlocked.

Why is this system interfering with me?

Another detail that never made sense to me is this: If I want to, I can use the key to unlock all of the doors at once by turning the key to the right twice, but not too quickly, or it will miss it, and not too slowly or it will reset. Turning the key to the left, on the other hand, locks all of the doors.

My wife drives a Hyundai, and it has a much simpler system. Lock the driver side door (from the inside or outside), and all four doors lock. Unlock the driver side door and all four unlock. Nice and uncomplicated, and very reliable. While it doesn’t have the lockout-proofing, it does have failure-proofing. It just works. For that matter, there is no reason that the lockout-proofing couldn’t be implemented in such a way as to still have it be failure proof.

Now, it probably comes as no surprise to my readers (either one of you) that I love, live and breathe technology. Application of technology should be … what was that word? Oh yeah, appropriate.