Call Me on the Telephone

My first cel phone was around 1990. Big, heavy, short battery life. It was rented for a trip down into the US for Michael Caplan Entertainment, hauling trade show booth stuff for some Toronto area tourism outfit. The phone proved invaluable when the rented van died along highway 400 between Toronto and Mount Albert, Ontario.

Since then I've owned about two dozen phones (and a pager before that). I've hit the point where I've long since stopped being amazed by always-on connectivity, and instead have come to mostly despise the things.

In the first place, almost no-one phones another person any longer, either because it feels like too much hassle, or because you're dealing with a corporation that works incredibly hard to block you from talking to a real, live human. Things that could be handled in two minutes on the phone (TD Insurance) require ten minutes of battling stupid voice systems that never, ever work until you start shouting HUMAN HUMAN HUMAN into your phone.

Or Nova Scotia Power, who routinely leave customers on hold for forty-five minutes rather than just hiring more staff. And whose email address, on their web site, returns a message that literally says:

Thank you for your patience as we work to restore systems impacted by the recent cyber incident. More information can be found on our website at nspower.ca.

At this time, we are not managing email inquiries. We apologize for the inconvenience. For immediate customer service requests, please call Customer Care at 1-800-428-6230 Monday to Friday from 8am to 6pm.

That cyber incident was many months ago, and there's no sign that it's really been fixed.

The smart-phone beside me instead is the home to some three or four dozen apps, some mandated - try banking without a smart-phone - some alleging to improve my life. The reality is that most apps only function one quarter of the time. Or they get updated and lose the one feature you relied on. Or they throw endless pop-ups into your face, making it nearly impossible to use them. Or, increasingly, demand that you accept some half-baked AI "solution" that just adds more steps and more hassle to what should be a simple task.

Or, like the Boots pharmacy app, or in Canada, the Scene grocery app, simply stop working at random times.

Or like the NX app, from the National Express train service in the UK, which inexplicably start taking £18 a month out of my bank account. I vaguely recall installing that app in January when I needed to find a way back from London to Cambridge, but I'm certain I never signed up for a crazy expensive subscription.

It's now reached the point where the two biggest uses for my expensive smart-phone are sending text-messages to people who don't answer their phones, or sending WhatsApp messages using one of the most clumsy, confusing interfaces imaginable - though still better than Slack.

I guess at the bottom of all of this is some forty years of on-line life, starting when the Internet was truly amazing, and when every other month delivered a new service that honestly improved your life, and solved a problem with simplicity and grace - remember when Google appeared, and promised to "Do No Evil."?

I've always embraced technology, and for a very long time loved it, but feel now that it has been destroyed by nasty, greedy tech lords who want only to squeeze every last penny out of my bank account.

And that makes me sad.