The breaking point

One of the fascinating things about repairing drain cables and equipment are the the laments which I hear along the way. At times I wonder if people ever actually think about what they say.
Broken cables always just break. The operator never ever put too much pressure on it. Never, ever. They were simply feeding it into the drain line and it broke. I was told by a customer that his cable broke not once but eight times, all while he sat driving his van. He insisted he could hear it breaking as he drove: several sharp pings in a row as the machine simply sat there. Another claimed, I am not making this up, that he just looked at his machine and the cable snapped. Of course, he was kinda ugly...but the point is that most cable breakages supposedly occur though absolutely no fault of the operator. Right.
A favorite question for me is, why did my machine break? It is often asked with incredulity. My answer is, I think, obvious. Everything is subject to break. Nothing made by human hands lasts forever. Your equipment, your cars, your refrigerator; they all break, and sometimes we just don't know why. How can you be shocked by that? Now, if I can see an obvious reason I will tell them. Yet the most obvious reason is abuse. They don't seem to care to hear that...
Then there's the equally incredulous, it was working and then it just stopped! Again, why are you surprised? Everything works until it doesn't.
Sometimes I just sigh about it. Other times I blog about it. Today is your lucky day.