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.

I loathe digital admin. I spend all day logged in at work and then have another few hours doing house buying /DC /bills /elderly parent admin involving numerous portals, passwords, glitchy websites. Hate it. Doesn't feel like human advancement to me.

This riles me too. The damn computer is supposed to be clever. It knows who I am, what language I am using, and where I am located. It also knows what I have answered to that question every single time I've been asked it before. So why does it not hazard a wild guess and put the UK / English-speaking countries at the top of the list?

AI my arse.

@WhatterySquashthe fat-fingered are not a protected characteristic but totally should be 😆

It’s indirect age discrimination though, re PCs… worth thinking about.

I don’t watch TV. I hate our setup at home.
I remember the switcher with on / off / up / down / vol
Four channels. That was plenty!

My phone died on me several months ago. The absolute horrendous shitshow that resulted showed me that not being access my phone was an absolute disaster. It took weeks and weeks to port my number for various reasons and I couldn’t get into anything as a result. I nearly had a nervous breakdown.

Same. It’s such a shame.

@blandana thank you so much I’ll give it one good try today and if it’s still obtuse that’ll be that. The woman I spoke to thought I was mad asking could I not have it authenticated by a person even though the MOJ have a massive recruitment issue and Sophra are making it impossible

I totally agree OP. Password management is my own personal annoyance- if anyone has tips on how to do that effectively, let me know! I’m always forgetting them and always never sure what I’ve used and where. I’m sure there’s a good way to manage it but no idea what.

I would, however, like to celebrate good tech for a little moment- anything I’ve done on Gov.co.uk is massively easy, really simple and straightforward. How it should be

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

He is also cofounder of Duolingo, and is a billionaire.

Completely agree

Thanks for this thread @blandana - I've never felt more connected ( oh, the irony).
Resonate with all that's been said.

One of the reasons I left teaching was because of the increase in technology demands. Even taking the register had to be done via tech.
I'm old school ( started teaching 1992), and taking the register manually was a way of interacting - a quick catch up with various pupils ( you did well yesterday, John, keep it up.....hope your mum's OK, Jane....etc, etc).
Yes, it was tiring but I loved that personal approach.
( sorry if I've gone off topic !).

Completely with you. My daughter has brought home about 7 letters from school over the last few weeks it's exhausting having to note everything in my phone calendar. And don't even get me started on the constant updates from her dance school. I feel your pain!

I’m with you on the self service tills.

I hate how the automated cultured female (and it’s always female….why?!) voice keeps telling you to scan the next item if you’re going too slow according to its programming. This must be what Amazon warehouse packers feel like only they do it on endless loop at 100x speed. And the camera recording you. Ugh. All this tech does - hugely - add to the time to complete just about any task. In the early days it did make work more efficient but we’ve passed that point. Is there some law about that?

Plus, it sucks up all our personal data. That data which is, in my opinion, stolen from us is used to make other people fantastically wealthy. Facebook, google, any platform all make incredible sums from selling our data in real time. We only have to look at the US to see how that technology is increasingly used to police its citizens in deeply dangerous ways. Especially for women.

So tech = makes tasks longer + reduces human connections + steals our data + makes largely white middle aged men extraordinarily wealthy? Great.

I've lived on an island for the last 20 years and I have rarely been to a city in that time. I had a conference to attend last year and I felt like I had been transported into the future. Everything from ordering food, to getting a taxi or catching a bus, needed an app.

There is no staff to help if you don't know how to use the touch screens, in the fast food places the receipts often aren't available, so the food service number flashed up and I had forgotten it by the time it was called out, because I was so overwhelmed by just navigating the amount of people in one place. Nobody makes eye contact and that's just the service staff.

I couldn't work out how to use the app to catch a bus and when I went into the train station I realised I'd left my glasses back at the hotel room so I couldn't read the vast digital timetable and couldn't find any staff to ask. The app for the taxi kept cancelling while I was stood waiting for it. I ended up walking miles every day from the city centre to the conference place just so I didn't have to use any transport because I couldn't cope with the technology, when I did manage to get on a bus the drivers were rude and snappy if I didn't automatically know which system they used to pay.

The last straw was when I went to pizza hut and tried to download the app to order at the table but there was no signal so I couldn't. I have never been so glad to get to an airport and be delayed for 5 hours before, I did not care as long as I was on my way home to my lovely peaceful island, where people say hello and you can order at the counter.

Don’t get me started on cookies! Accept all cookies do we can share your personal details with our 999 partners! Who will share our details with their 999 partners. I want to shout at the computer just f*ck off with trying to monetise all my details. The bloody time it takes to click one by one. And now thanks the ICO ruling, we can be forced into sharing unless we pay for access.

And the personal data they hoover is very personal.

@Inthebasketunderthematcheswhere is this paradise of which you speak?

you don’t have to say, obviously. I live rurally and feel similar whenever I have to go to a busy place.

I'm in Shetland, we do have self service in the supermarkets, which my husband says he will use when they pay him to do the job for them, and the drs uses an online system, but you are still able to phone and speak to a human who will then go out of their way to help you out.

Even the school newsletter are a PITA - you get an email, but then have to click to read the letter.
What this means is that I have 4 million emails with the same subject "Headlines" and no way to search for the bit of info I read a month ago and need to remind myself of.

Our secondary school does this! All letters are sent out as a link, but they are all called 'Parent Letter' which is about as much use as a chocolate tea pot when you want to go back and double check something!

Ours sends out a Google drive link and forgets to set the permissions so we can actually read the fucking thing, I would say this happens 50% of the time 🙄

Fair point. I flag anything important but no other indication of what’s in the email a month or so later.

When booking Eurostar reservations via b-europe , the drop down menu offers you a choice of the most likely nationalities (Belgian, French, UK, US, Netherlands, Germany) at the top of the list. So no need to scroll through Venezuela and Vanuatu like every other bleddy website. Be more like b-europe, other companies!

Can you give examples for your final paragraph? This is interesting.

The most annoying is when you have to click back pages for date of birth. Not so bad for me, frustrating when I’m filling in forms for elderly parents born in the 1930s 😟 start to panic sometimes that it will cut off at 1940 or something!