Every time you buy a sexy new gadget, it means getting a bunch of very non-sexy problems. That new cell phone? It has a 73 page manual called “Downloading the Getting Started Manual.” Eventually you have to ask your extremely not sexy acquaintance to help you find the “on” switch. He does so, but then he thinks you’re friends and wants you to come to his Doctor Who costume party and he’s going to bug you about not showing up every time you buy another stupid gadget and need his help.
In electronics, everything is always on the cutting edge, which means basically that the bugs haven’t been worked out yet. As soon as the bugs have been worked out, then a Chinese company steals the design and sells it for $20, which inspires mainstream companies to move on to something even more cutting edge which means new bugs. If you attempt to hold on to your old technology not only will people in coffee shops smirk at you, but you won’t be able to buy batteries for it and eventually it will be dead by default. The end result it that we live in a technology world continuously infected by bugs.
Companies like Microsoft are continuously trying to help out on this issue. Microsoft was the inventor of such pundits as that weird cartoon dog and of course the paper clip guy. Remember that Office feature? Every time you typed the word “dear” this little cartoon paperclip popped up and it wanted to help you write a letter. Unfortunately, using the feature was much harder than writing a letter, and who writes letters anyway?
Not long ago, I was sitting at the airport with an MP5 player trying to watch a movie that turned out not to be compatible with my player and so after a few minutes that words got a minute faster than the actors. Eventually everything got all choppy and digitally and I had to stop the movie and start it again. As I was restarting the House Bunny for the sixth time, looking at a three-inch screen, with actors talking like old kung fu movies I marveled just how far technology has taken us.
An old joke used to be the blinking “12:00” on the VCR because no one could figure out (or really cared) how to set the time. Now that joke has expanded to the array of downloaded programs on a computer that were used for one frustrating hour and abandoned, 90 percent of cell phone features never touched, a row of F-numbers on top of computers with dust on them, lights on a vehicle dashboard that must mean something, an abandoned website set up by a nephew, and vague notions of things like Skype and Twitter that must be great because everybody talks about but who has (or wants to have) three days to figure them out? And now that joke has ceased to be funny.
What I want more than anything is for these companies to go away. The less I see of them, the better. Make things as easy as opening a book, turning on a black and white TV, or tuning a radio. Things with more than three buttons are disturbing. And anything that you have to learn new words just to operate it, is a total time suck. You don’t need urban dictionary to know what that means.
by Nathan Lindberg
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