This episode’s vocabulary
To malfunction
verb — to fail to work or operate correctly.
To monitor
verb — to watch and check a situation carefully for a period of time in order to discover something about it.
Fault
noun — something that is wrong with a machine or system.
Shoddy
adj. — badly and carelessly made, using low quality materials.
To reprogram
verb — to program (an electronic device) again or differently.
To fix
verb — to repair something.
To wind up
phrasal verb — to find yourself in an unexpected and usually unpleasant situation, especially as a result of what you do.
To install
verb — to put a computer program onto a computer so that the computer can use it.
Mandatory
adj. — something that is mandatory must be done, or is demanded by law.
Hassle
noun — (a situation causing) difficulty or trouble.
Well maintained
adj. — kept in good order or condition.
Questions and answers
Rory, tell us your story!
Well, the other day, our smart meter malfunctioned. It's like a small electronic device, which monitors the energy consumption in the house, and it tells you how much everything costs. Well, once you've consumed the energy, that is. It's part of a government initiative to get people to use energy more responsibly. Although if you ask me, using energy to power a device that's supposed to tell you how to save energy seems a little bit contradictory. But maybe it has another purpose that I'm missing. Apparently, it wasn't showing an accurate reading and it needed to be fixed. And it has apparently done this a few times. So it definitely needed to be reset or made more accurate somehow. I'm not exactly sure what caused this fault. But if I were to guess I would put it down to shoddy manufacturing processes and a lack of quality control. These things were clearly mass produced in an effort to get as many of them out as fast as possible. So it makes sense that some of them wouldn't work properly. And they just fall to pieces. I'm actually equally unclear on how it was repaired as well. I know we had to call an engineer to come and take a look at it. And I think he reprogrammed it. So apparently it works just fine. Though, to look at it, I don't think much has changed aside from the price on the display going up. So it's possible that it's either broken again, or by fixing it, we've actually wound up paying more. So I don't know if that's considered to be a success or not. I wasn't particularly bothered about getting it fixed, to be honest. Getting them installed was mandatory. But I found out recently that if you just ignored the letters and the emails from the government about them, then no one would care. So we could have avoided a lot of hassle if we'd done precisely that. Regardless, it's fixed now. And everything in the house is working again, which is the main thing.
And do you often have something broken in your home?
No, everything's quite well maintained.
Thank you, Rory, for your answer! -