How many times have you rolled up to the McDonald’s drive-thru window, salivating at the thought of getting a chocolate sundae or an Oreo McFlurry only to be told, "Sorry, the machine is out of order".
If you're like me, you'd tell the staff to close up and go home because how dare they operate with a broken ice cream machine, but you're not me so I don't know what you'd do.
So you can imagine how happy I was to stumble across an article about a tech company offering to help McDonald’s ice cream machines.
iFixit is known to fix smartphones and now they are setting their sights on the burger place with the golden arches.
According to Sky News, iFixit made a video of a McDonald's ice cream machine and how, if the US changed a copyright law, they could fix the machines easy-peasy.
At the moment, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibits people from fixing commercial equipment that is protected by the copyright law. Sky News reported that the firm Taylor, the company that makes the machines, has signed an agreement with McDonald's which means only Taylor can fix the McDonald's ice cream machines.
In an article on their website, iFixit said they've managed to crack exemptions on everything from on iPhones to tractors, but ice cream machines are illegal to fix.
They said if they are granted the exemption, they would be able to not only take the machines apart, they would reverse engineer error codes and figure out how to reset them.
iFixit is hoping that the Freedom to Repair Act is reintroduced which would make the repair legal, thereby exempting permanently, all repair activities from Section 1201 of the DCMA.
"Until we get that full exemption, ice cream machine repair will stay broken," iFixit said.
Let's hope iFixit gets it right ... until then, I scream. You scream. We all scream for ice-cream!
IOL