Almost turning 'Hulk' and Peter Dormer

The button on my I-pad stopped working; I tried pressing the button a few times, nothing.  My father, having seen all this, thought he could do better – despite his age and technical incompetence, it appears it’s a parent thing.  ‘Give it here’ he said, stabbing his thumb onto the button until the skin under his thumb nail went white – twice!  He turned it around, looking for something else, the ‘push here to fix everything magic button that only appears when something goes wrong,’ but unsurprisingly it wasn’t there.  He shook my I-pad and stabbed the button again.  ‘Nope, it’s not working,’ he said handing it back.  I’m beginning to experience the same feelings as Peter Banner, just before he rips his shorts, turns green and destroys the house. ‘Oh, so having watched me, you were somehow under the illusion that doing exactly the same thing, after a 5 second delay, but twice as hard would somehow be the ideal remedy – brilliant!  If it wasn’t working before it probably won’t now!’  On calming down, I was reminded of an extract by the late and great Peter Dormer, from his book ‘The Meanings of Modern Design’ in which he describes how we used to feel the need to bash the top of the TV when it went on the blink even though there were no mechanical parts and how interestingly this often worked, enforcing the behaviour.  These days you can’t do this because TV’s are becoming so thin, you’ll cut yourself as it rips off the wall.  Our relationships with objects are changing. I wonder if this behaviour is inbuilt, that the less we understand how something works, the more we resort to shaking it.  Or, having grown up with mainly mechanical items, this is a generational trait that will be phased out in subsequent generations.  Regardless, Peter Dormers book remains an interesting read, even if like everything else it will go out of date.  Despite the lack of a magic button, plugging my I-pad in (even though it was charged) seemed to fix the problem and fortunately, no shorts needed to be torn.