I’m on a tear about technology today. It started this morning at work when I was asked to make two calendars from one my work group has on our SharePoint. Simple enough right? Make a new calendar, put what is needed on the new one and delete that same content off the old.
But no. It’s not that simple.
Without going into all kinds of boring details there’s no longer a button to click to create a new calendar (which by the way was hidden & knowing how to find that one was a feat in & of itself).
Now there are new apps that don’t even have names that a normal human would know what they are. After a time too long to admit, I found a ‘calendar looking’ app. I went to click on it, and was asked to request access. At that point I was provided a link where I could check the status of my request.
About 10 minutes later I get an email from an IT link about my calendar looking app request. The app was not yet approved; but I received another link to a page with help to find apps. There I learn that there is a link to the “Classics”. The classics are documents, calendars, announcements, group chats… The classics? You mean what real living and breathing employees use? Am I that old?
I just can’t with this stuff.
I thought I finally learned how to work my “Smart” TV. I know what the remotes do and how to add & delete apps, subscribe to channels, etc. Things my older family members and siblings have yet to figure out. Maybe my kids have, but I’m not so sure. However, when I went to watch a few purchased Holiday videos a few weeks back I learned that Fandango where I bought them was sold to some other company. I spent about an hour trying to get to my old account and figure out passwords and where to find “purchased content”. I never found it. We just ended up watching what was free.
What was so wrong with purchasing content that you can hold in your hand and keep in your cabinet? I still don’t know what happened to the movies I paid for.
My car is a 2017 Prius. It has a touch screen and built-in navigation that never seems to work. Or when I do get the nav to work, I can’t seem to ever turn off the route. Every button, every option, every possible thing… and there is no “End Route” or equivalent. Sometimes the built in Siri works, sometimes not. I don’t even know 80% of what my car is capable of. And this car came out 6 years ago! I don’t even want to think about what a 2022 model can do that I’d never know after having it for 5 years.
Every time I go into my husband’s car (Telsa) I can’t even find the place to press the “Esterina” button because new updates moved it.
I look around and I don’t see many people smarter than me using all these features and things with ease.
When I do figure things out, they don’t seem to work.
I programmed Alexa to go through a morning routine, but the news app I chose always cut out mid report. At first Alexa finished the routine, but then she stopped. I checked the programming and it was all still the same. I changed the news source and the same thing happened – worked for a few days then the news source stopped mid briefing the routine ended.
I can’t tell you how many times I went to play a song or album I KNOW I bought but it’s disappeared from my iTunes.
Family Share works terribly. The apps my husband or I purchase and try to share never come over to the other phone. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get his music. What is the family share even for? It says it does these things, but they either don’t work or we can’t figure them out after spending inornate amounts of time trying.
We had a smart oven for a short bit of time. The buttons were so sensitive that if your sleeve brushed against it while grabbing a pot the whole thing would turn off. One of our cats constantly walked across the stove and turned it on. Luckily there was a lock feature, but the “Smart” part of the oven doesn’t work when the lock is on. I can’t tell you why we bought a smart stove. You need to link Alexa through 3rd party apps to it, and it worked at best half the time.
Same with our “smart” lights. We use GoSund. They continually unlink from the programming. When you just want to turn on the light and say “#?!*&” to the programming, they blink uncontrollably. They are unusable as just an ordinary light at that point. So – it’s either the dark or pull out the phone and spend 5-10 minutes figuring out what went wrong.
We have a Wi-Fi enable dryer. I have no idea how to use it with the Wi-Fi or what I’d use it for.
1,001 very cool things have been made by me or others at work in the past 10-12 years. Things that make people’s lives easier. BUT almost all have become undone due to updates, websites that moved, or macros that broke. I spend way too much of my time trying to figure out what someone who left the organization did in the background to fix something someone relied upon that stopped working.
Even here – on Word Press where I am writing this blog I’m befuddled. It seems like each time I get on things moved or have a new name. I have been using this platform since 2015 and all I know how to do is post a blog. I know Word Press can do so many super things, but when I start to read about them or try to figure them out I run into so many walls I just give up and need to put the computer in another room.
This just isn’t cool. This is all a colossal waste of time. The world is getting too complicated and regular people can’t (and don’t want to) keep with the changes forced upon us. Can we just cool it already?
Competition creates more and more and faster and faster – for what? Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. Similar to the industrial revolution and the assembly line. Simply because we can make a million widgets an hour, doesn’t mean we should. But we did, and then we created a whole new discipline called marketing to encourage people to buy what they didn’t need. Then they needed to work harder and longer to pay for the unnecessary widgets. This is the part of history that most of us were born into and accept blindly without question.
Life didn’t get better because we have homes triple the size with quadruple the number of possessions. We should learn from the past and take a break from making things that make no sense. Technology advances for consumers does not work well yet. The population hasn’t caught up to what is out there, and the programmers have not figured out the bugs. I wish the techies of this world would stop creating and just focus on making what we already have better for a while.
I know humans thrive on creation and Henry Ford famously said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”. However there are one too many creators, none of them collaborate, and we have one big hot mess going on. Let’s be creative with making the status quo actually work. Henry Ford made the car, not a spaceship. It seems like we need the equivalent to cars in our lives, not spaceships things we have no use for.
Honestly – If I am an upper-middle class citizen with a Masters degree in a first world country that happens to be in a pocket of humans that can figure out technology faster than my 20 something year old adult children and faster than my parent’s generation – I beg to ask the question, who or what on are we advancing consumer technology for?
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