Coping with life as we now know it

This missive is aimed at readers who, like myself, may remember when there were only three television channels, the Nokia 3310 mobile phone was considered a technological marvel, supermarkets were closed on Sunday, and, if you wanted a holiday, you needed to visit your travel agent.

Social Influencers

These are predominantly young people who have a penchant to become celebrities but lack any perceivable talent to otherwise become one. Instead, they garner an incredible number of millennials, who, for some reason known only to themselves, follow their every word on social media. These social influencers wax lyrically, in very bad English, about products and services they actually know little about and in fact sometimes never actually use themselves. But they do have the last laugh. They receive payment for their cultured pearls of wisdom.

Passwords

We are told to use complex passwords. While this is sound advice, we of a certain age never input them correctly first time. Or second time. Especially on our mobile devices. This is because unless wearing our reading spectacles, which we need our distance spectacles to locate, we cannot see the small, 6cm screen, and our fingers have lost the dexterity to type in the correct sequence using the even smaller 5cm wide mobile phone keypad. And despite the complex passwords we are now using, we have to then receive a special one-time code to our mobiles which we can’t see because of our existing lost spectacles situation. And in trying to open the message to read the password, we accidentally close the website we were using that needed the one time code. All for a £12 black ink cartridge for the printer.

The car boot sale

I decide to have a domestic clear-out, and what better way than the fun of a 4am start to queue up and sell at the local car boot sale. I even went to the local DIY store and parted with £15 for a paste table I will possibly never use again, certainly not for wallpapering, as I am forbidden from such activities by all members of the family. But car boot sales work on that peculiar basis that most of us have lost the ability to cope with - cash and small change. So, I head off to my local bank to obtain some change. It is closed and is now an Italian restaurant. However, since 2015, in excess of 5,600 local bank branches have closed, one of those being mine, which in fairness, I have helped to close because the last time I stepped inside it was in 2010. So should someone offers me 50p for that awful vase my late mother-in-law bought me that the local charity shop politely refused, and then presents a £10 note, I’m sunk.

Booking a holiday online

We amateur travel agents simply can’t cope with booking online travel. We see a “flights from £58” to Milan (yes, we need to then register, decide a password and once again struggle with a one time pass code), and think that would be nice for a break next month. When we finally get into the website, there is no sign of a £58 flight to Milan, But wait, there it is, leaving on a Wednesday in the middle of April next year! Then we are asked, do you want to take a bag, do you want insurance, do you want a hotel, do you want a car, do you want in in flight meal, do you want to pay for a seat, do you want a token for the toilet, do you want a priority boarding pass? So by the time we have pressed the “pay” button, the £58 flight is now £365 (and that’s just one-way) and we realise that we really should have just nipped into the local travel agent in the first place and left the details with them to do all the work.

The computer that slows down to a crawl

I have been a Firefox browser (other browsers are available) user on my Windows computer for longer that I can remember. The computer itself is a quite fast i7 machine. When it comes to the ubiquitous updates, in particular the now quite huge 1GB+ Windows ones, I have my machine set to “automatically update”, which it should do as instructed “after 10pm” when I should be either watching TV or out for an evening and before I close it down at around midnight. However, the moment there is an update on the horizon, the PC slows to a crawl unless I press “update now” and then have to cease my PC activities for an hour while it does its business. And should it be a Firefox update, I will inevitably be thrown out of my browser without warning just as I’m about to pay for my £365 “£58” flight to Milan. And when the PC is updated, the irritating Cortana and all those unwanted X-Box apps that I had patiently disabled will have all come back again. And I will need to log back into every website using my complex passwords and accompanying one-time codes that are sent to my phone that I can’t see! Help!

Contacting my broadband supplier

It’s 10.30pm. I’ve had a long day and decide to retire to bed to watch a film on one of the streaming channels. 15 minutes from the end, the internet decides to stop. My internet provider offers a 24-hr help line, which, seeing as it’s one of their “unique” services, I decide to use. After 15 minutes of screaming in various repeated answers to questions that identify me, but that their AI (artificial intelligence - lack of intelligence more like) cannot understand, I finally get through to a set of automated options, the first of which tells me to visit their website for answers to common problems, and the AI system then cleverly disconnects me. It disconnects me before I have the chance to interrogate it as to how I can get online for answers to my problem when it’s the internet that is broken and it is the specific reason I’m phoning to speak to a human in the first place!

Gmail digests my draft email but will not regurgitate it

I’ve just spent 30 minutes crafting a wonderful complaint to an organisation. I nip into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. When I return, I re-read the email, I’m happy with it, and I press the send button, and off it goes. The following day, the organisation thanks me for my email which they assure me they will reply to within three years. However, I have thought of something I omitted, so decide to send an updated version. But the email is not in my sent folder. It’s not in the bin (something Gmail has an annoying habit of doing), it’s not in spam, it’s not in “important”, in fact, it’s nowhere to be seen. I search using words is used in both the title and in the email itself. But nothing. It has gone. Disappeared. So I will have to rely on the organisation answering me, hopefully with a copy of my original email.

Dictating into a PC (laptop and not Police Officer!)

Dictation into OpenOffice Libre Write on the PC is so much more efficient and faster than Microsoft's version which makes it a complete pain in the chassis, because it's all geared to using a Miscrofot 365 account to work at its best.

A far superior user experience from open source software.

"Shot" and "foot" comes to mind Bill (Gates)! I could get very used to OpenOffice (or, despite the nag message every time it opens up, the free version of Textmaker from Ashampoo).