The mental exhaustion of tech

[blandana]

School requests payment for something (hurrah!)
Log into payment site
Site always takes you to the admin page and not the parent log in so faff about trying to get into the correct log in area. Find correct school, find correct log in details
Select child (I have multiple so have to find the right one)
Find what I have to pay for
Give consent
Fill in details (medical, emergency)
Pay for item
Fill in payment details, payment rejected
Try again - payment method accepted but needs to be verified on banking app first
Banking app doesn’t log in because face recognition doesn’t work
Log in manually to banking app
Approve payment
Go back to site
Payment goes through
Finally, exhausted, my child can go on the school trip.

At this point I’d much rather put £15 in an envelope and be done with it.

Yes, I know we are in the era of everything tech and that’s just the way it is. And the idea of filling out paper forms isn’t thrilling either. But I hate the screens, the tech, the facelessness and thanklessness of it,
it’s exhausting and I don’t like it.

I’ve had a hard day and that’s the tip of the iceberg.

Feel marginally better now I’m going to get off this screen and climb a hill.

The worst for me has been moving to a very expensive supposedly high tech scheduling app which should automatically save appointments to my calendar and set up Zoom meetings. But each of the apps involved falls out of sync with all the others at regular intervals creating a clusterfuck of double-bookings and missing Zoom links.

It promised so much, and has only created more work and stress.

I’m going back to a paper diary and scheduling appointments over the phone.

I’m with you OP. Everything requires an app, or authentication, or a portal, or passwords which can’t be the same as any other password and require different characters, or websites with FAQs and no way of speaking to an actual person outwith very limited hours which isn’t possible when you’re in wall to wall meetings at work and you don’t have time to wait in long telephone queues.

Tech can be great, but it’s overly complicated now and excludes far too many people as a result.

I’m going back to a paper diary and scheduling appointments over the phone.

I use a paper diary as no calendar or scheduling app has ever come close to doing what I want easily and simply. I'd retrain as a programmer and write one myself if I had time! All I want is a simple app that is straightforward to enter events into and doesn't mess everything up and stick things where I don't want them! And lets me colour code properly. Shouldn't be that hard.

Oh yes I agree, I know all this authenticatuon stuff is meant to make it secure but Im not great at charging my phone, I'm always hunting for it half way through a transaction. DH phoned me at work today because Amazon delivery person needed a code that was sent to my phone.
I'm also not great at verifying I'm not a robot-sometimes it takes a few attempts, do you count the square that has a slither of a traffic light in it or not?!
And yes are we England, Great Britain or United Kingdom and why can't we be right at top of list on British websites!!
How many people from Afghanistan are ordering from UK websites FGS!
Oh and ring doorbells, I now know when anyone in our open plan office has a delivery driver at their door, how did we ever manage without it!!!!

I started a new role and have been very open about how I hate Zoom so am pushing for in person inductions and hello coffee meetings etc. pretty much everyone has been delighted and admitted that they too are sick of it all being online that it’s so nice to actually get out of their houses! Ditto supermarkets etc. when invited to use self service tills I just say No thanks, I prefer humans and wait in the human queue! I would rather stare into space in a queue than interact with the machine voice. It actually enrages me.

It's all the different accounts you need for all the different websites for buying and ordering.
I resuse the same password a lot, but then sometimes they want you to add a symbol or capital letter, so then there's no way of remembering.
Then when you do buy, book or order something, you get all the 'we'd love to hear your opinion' emails after.

I hate Zoom too, and I'm a major introvert so you'd think I would prefer to be sat at home ad do meetings online, but it's always, always a massive pain. Goes wrong, takes ages, meetings are stilted and awkward, and I find it harder to "read" people. Zoom coffee mornings and online events are even worse.

I also hate pop ups and not being able to just access what I want to look at quickly. First the cookies consent thing, Then a pop up asking you to do a feedback survey or offering you 10% off something, Or both. I'm regularly to be hear yelling ARGH JUST FUCK OFF as I try to clear the screen to actually find something out.

I'm also not great at verifying I'm not a robot-sometimes it takes a few attempts, do you count the square that has a slither of a traffic light in it or not?!

The CAPTCHA test gives me the rage. Whoever invented it ought to be taken out and shot and companies that use it boycotted.

OMG YES! Just leave me alone! How am I supposed to know if that's a corner of a traffic light or a blimmin motorbike wheel!? I don't have great eyesight and I'm bloody knackered, I do not want to do a stupid traffic light puzzle. I regularly mess these up and get given easier and easier ones and feel like a right fuckwit.

I mean, I'm doing all this perfectly fine on Google Calendar.

The stupid cookies.

Every website I click into makes me consent to cookies over and over again. What an utter waste of time, the company's time and cost of developing this so some bureaucrat can be happy we all know over and over again we are being spied on to sell us more things. I reject all cookies just to be perverse. Not that the farce makes a difference.

You know they are using this data to train AI?

I reject cookies too but aren’t they so sneaky and clever that they make rejecting them a few steps longer, meaning you have to actually use your brain a tiny bit in order to do it.
Feck those cookies.

Well if AI trains on my responses it will be as thick as pigshit.

OK I will have another look - thanks

@WhatterySquashi have always been a paper diary girl until this year insanity took hold of me and I went digital. I loved it, was singing its praises, how great it prefills all your repeated events and appointments and I can share it with my tech-loving children.
However not having a physical thing or a physical memory of scribbling something down just doesn’t work. It’s all there online but it doesn’t stick like a diary entry does.

Yes I do get that too - writing things down in itself helps to reinforce them.

But also I don't want it to repeat things and all that jazz - I think I want it to work like a paper diary. I put something where I want to put it and colour it the colour I want it and it stays there and doesn't dick me about, but will do reminders if I select that.

Watch out then when it preempts what you want to write…

I feel the same, I find having to deal with it very stressful, especially when it goes wrong e.g. my email account randomly throws me out and gives me a worrying message that makes me think I’ll never get into my account again. And I worry about my phone number being linked to everything, and what would happen if I were without my phone.

I find the constant bombardment of information and requests too much. Take school; my parents might had had a few letters a year about important matters, whereas now it’s constant, and the DC can’t even have a school dinner without me having to book specific meals for each day on a very glitchy system.

With failing eyesight I fear the future with mobiles and apps being the only way, more and more.

No matter how much I squint or stare at the tiny screen I can never locate the [Fuck Off And Die] button.

I sit there at my actual computer, logged into website - hoorah. It then won’t let me do a thing unless it’s with their arsing App. I hate typing on my phone, I want to use a proper keyboard.

Don’t even get me started on the Chinese site I have to do my travel claims with (I work for a Hong Kong company). It’s all of the above everyone has mentioned but in Chinese!

I'm glad this doesn't just happen to me!

I tend to do all of my online transactions on a computer now, specifically so I can have one window on top with the merchant on one device and another with the bank on top on the other. It's also annoying that most banks/cards insist that you can only have one "approved device", so keeping my old phone just for online banking approvals (which would also be more secure, as it wouldn't leave the house) isn't really practical.

Usually if you click the year, which is displayed between the left and right arrows that you get to move to the previous month, you will get a dropdown list for the years. 🙏

But you can’t accidentally book something in for the wrong day / month / time / time zone through a slip of the thumb in a paper diary.

Or accidentally put something in as a task rather than an event, so it doesn’t show up in your toady or mark the time as unavailable.

Or any of the other things I keep fucking up on Google calendar through not paying attention because I’m also trying to do 70 million other things on my phone / laptop at the same time.

I sit there at my actual computer, logged into website - hoorah. It then won’t let me do a thing unless it’s with their arsing App. I hate typing on my phone, I want to use a proper keyboard.

Yes why is this? All the endless wanging on about inclusivity and yet they don't think about people with bad eyesight / fat fingers when they make you do everything essential and urgent on the app. Just what is the advantage to them of having things you can do on the app but not on the website? Royal Bank of Scotland I'm looking at you, you bastards.