The new Information Technology - IT to you and me - is so
advanced it has to be other worldly.
This is the internet, launched in 1983, same year as the
first mobile phone. Desk top computers
arrived in the 1970s and the first of the ubiquitous smartphones in 1994.
We know, don’t we, that the inspiration for all of these
gizmos came from the planet Zob in the constellation of Zing, courtesy of the
Intergalactic Federation of Planets (IFP)
which reckoned we needed a leg up on the technology front.
It came with conditions of course. In exchange for sharing this new tech with us
they wanted permission to secretly abduct and/or tag people and animals, and
for experiments.
Well, you go ahead, US President Eisenhower who allegedly
met these exotic tech savvy visitors to our planet in 1950s, said. But confine
yourselves to lifting people out of South America. They are a very religious
and superstitious and if word did get out no one would believe them.
Well, these activities have since become more widespread.
No evidence to support this, of course.
However, in 2023, 4,432,880 people worldwide were reported
missing.
But hey, so many more of us have also been abducted, taken
in, our lives blessed by this new tech, which
in recent decades has extended to smart phones - a blessed nuisance if you ask me.
This past decade has seen many innovative tricks offered to
those using this technology, while those who choose not to find themselves
increasingly marginalised, left out of the loop, excluded. Some of them won’t
mind. But many do.
The plus factor in this new technology is the lightning
speed we can access facts and figures, news and obtain and share information previously
accessible only after research at a library which may have necessitated taking
a bus ride and packed lunch.
But this new tech can also be a pain the arse. This is not
the fault of the gizmo; rather it is the nerds who design the software who have
created this form of madness.
In the old days a letter would arrive in the post. You open
it and read the information – maybe it’s an appointment; an invoice; your
credit balance; your energy bill.
Information received and understood.
Today, you get a text on y our phone or an email. It says,
here is your appointment details/balance/bill. Whatever.
Except the information can only be accessed by clicking on a link, and so begins the game devised by the Nerd. So it's click this, click that, swipe, swipe, swipe....
You need to enter your password – which you cannot remember
from the 100s of passwords already accumulated, some OF SOME LENGTH and
complicated. So, with luck, you find the
password in your password notebook. Enter it. If you are lucky this is accepted.
Or it may say it doesn’t recognise it when it plainly should, which leads to an
infuriating dance on the keyboard before it goes through.
And you move on to the next blasted step. You are asked to confirm your age; your email
address; your postcode; inside leg measurement; what you had for breakfast.
I am sorry, say the words on the screen, you need to fill in
all the required zones; highlighted with a red asterisk.
You do it all again.
Then you may need a verification number, which it says will
be emailed to you directly.
So you then must go out of that file, into your email. Or
it’s a text to your phone which you have left in another room. You hurry to
retrieve it.
And yes, there is the
verification number with the added warning, you have 10 minutes to enter this
or you are knackered. You hurry back to the thing.
You hastily write down the number using the old art form of
pen and paper.
And then maybe you lose the link in which case the whole
shit show must be started again. But you may just be accepted, to continue this
tiresome business.
The system may yet reject you, of course, for it seems entirely
random, or it may allow you to see the information you so desperately want to
read.
Hey ho. We’re through.
And the message is no secret formula. It is simply the date,
time and location of the appointment; or whatever information they wish to impart.
A letter would be so much easier!
Or you want to download Wordfued. Some sort of game.
Password to begin with, then comes the verification code and the keyboard dance
to retrieve it and then enter it, then it wants ID number which you didn’t
even know you needed and don’t have.
So you invent one, and as soon as you enter this, Microsoft
take issues with it take over the screen to ask, are you sure you want to do
this?
Or if it doesn’t ask for ID, it calls for all sorts of other
pieces of information and after providing all of this the screen blinks and
goes back to the start. And it remains in this infuriating loop. Please provide
password, and so you begin again: until CRASH SMASH. That’s your laptop being thrown into the wall.
What a load of faff!
One can understand the need for security in bank
transactions for example. But even so, if the information had come in the post
it you simply could read it by opening the envelope.
More infuriating doings on the internet. You have located a
cycling club, stamp club, bakery club, dance club, whatever, and you may wish
to join or to glean more information.
But nowhere on the website is there a telephone number. This
is because the people you are trying to contact wish to avoid human contact if at
all possible. You may interrupt them at some other nefarious activity. So that
is understandable from their point of view. But not mine.
This new way of
communicating is being abused to keep potential customers at arm’s length by
requiring them to make contact by filling out forms and pressing send when all
along all you have wanted to do is speak to a
live person.
And then you must wait for a reply which may or may not
come.
Then there is the automated voice, the robot and the several
options which may or may not
answer your needs.
All the time you are required to press buttons, and finally, finally, you may
be put through t o a human who may, if you are lucky, speak clearly and in a
dialect you understand but probably
won’t.
The few companies I have had no such issues with have been
Sky, or Domestic and General, who quickly assign you a human being who speaks
clearly and sets about sorting your query.
But mostly, connections lead to confusion with the added
option of your mental breakdown.
SLAVES TO THE SMARTPHONE
And one other thing; smartphones. These gizmos, again as
good as they are, are also robbing us of the last vestiges of humanity with
their seductive on screen powers which means a lot of people now walk
everywhere holding the thing in an outstretched hand, crossing the road, eyes
glues to the screen, without looking for traffic or me – who is not on the
phone - walking towards them. |I will shout at the last second (MOVE IT!)
And there is using a phone while driving; another obsession.
They don’t care they could kill people, which happens because their response
time, because their minds are taken by the gizmo, is worse than if drunk.
And so it goes on and on and on.
People in what ordinarily used to be moments of necessary
idleness seated somewhere are now scrolling aimlessly gazing at the fleeting
passage of words and images with blank expressions of joylessness .
Oh, yes, and then there are the people using their
smartphones at the supermarket checkout.
And most times I am in line behind these arseholes; they are
faffing about swiping the screen to bring up the bar code scanner making
several attempts before succeeding with a smug expression. Or not. And I’m
muttering, use you’re bleeding card. It takes a second!!!
And worst of all, communication via smartphones is fast
becoming the way to access hotels, and other services to do business, to park
the car. That doesn’t bother me as we happily are carless. In 2019 it was estimated that 55 million
people in the UK had a smartphone.
Which means smartphones are becoming divisive, for all those
without are denied services accessible on QR codes and from using any links to
information provided in messages.
Finally, the satnav.
There I was in a lovely hotel on the edge of Exmoor many
years ago now. In the morning, at breakfast, I was moved to say to a couple who
were gazing out of the window in wonder. “Isn’t this a beautiful location?”
And he replied: “I’ve no idea where we are. We just followed
he satnav!” And he laughed. Imbecile.
If anyone was a candidate for alien abduction, he was.
………………
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