Stanford University Introduces New Planned Obsolescence Engineering Certificate

Stanford, California: In response to an urgent need in the manufacturing community, Stanford University has announced a new special certificate in Planned Obsolescence Engineering. This certificate, which will be available to all engineers (including mechanical, electrical, psychological, chemical, electro-chemical, chemico-electrical, psycho-electrical, and train engineers), “confirms that the engineer is proficient in all aspects of planned obsolescence, including both theory and practice.”

Janice Delgado, newly appointed director of the program, met with the press last night and explained the valuable function that this program will perform:

Although many Americans are still unaware of this, the increasing durability of too many of our contemporary engineered products is causing serious social and economic difficulties in our nation and in the world. Our new certification, available to practicing engineers in any discipline, will remedy this problem. Topics to be covered include destructive software and firmware updates; single points of failure; fads and fashions; random imperfections and failures; materials disintegration; planned incompatibility; and making products so irritating that people smash them out of frustration. This certificate fills a real need felt by manufacturers all over the world.

While the response to this new program has been overwhelmingly positive, there have been a few dissenting voices. Edgar Lara, spokespersonage (or spokesbeing) for the Educational Efficiency Institute, complained in a public statement early this morning, that “there is really no need for this program. Why not just hire students who flunk out of engineering school, instead of going to the expense of sending fully-trained engineers to an expensive program.”

Dennis White, assistant director of marketing for a well-known computer company named after a piece of fruit, responded to inquiries from the public as to whether his engineers would receive this additional training in the negative: “I really don’t see the need, as we are already the industry leader in planned obsolescence. Furthermore, we already have a cutting-edge in-house program to ensure that our engineers use as-many-hyphens-as-possible.”

“PlannedObsolescencePCB german,” by Linear77. CC0.