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.

Yesterday I was informed that DS is participating in an concert in the cathedral as part of his music GCSE, to which I have to take him. Here's a link to obtain tickets. OK. Not only did I have to pay a handsome amount for DS2 and I to have tickets, but the data scraping was unreal. I had to enter address, DOB, phone number, email about 5 times- and then exactly the same for DS2! Why did they need to have a 10 year old's address, email and phone number for a school concert?! Oh yeah, and then the payment wasn't accepted first time, and a flurry of texts and verifications to and from my bank had to happen 🙄.

Use auto generated passwords, especially if you use your phone a lot. Much safer from an internet fraud perspective and you’ll have a password app on your phone with them all stored in. No need for remembering random passwords every time. Although does mean using more tech, obviously 😆

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 have a system that works most of the time (though as I posted below I still get tripped up by sites behaving randomly).

I have a word which I use in all passwords. It's a 6-letter word and has an "i" in it which I replace with a 1, and a capital initial.
I take the name of the website (eg sainsbury's) and take the first two letters from it (or you could use any combo like the first and last, the last two, etc) and add them to the end of my word.
Then add two symbols eg ampersand and asterisk (same every time).

So for all passwords, i have an easy-to-remember formula, but the passwords are different from each other because of the site name. If I've forgotten a password, I can work it out using the formula.

It is bad practice not to provide context in the title of the link or at least in the body of the email, to make it searchable.

This is either poor IT design or poor process/training by the school to the administrators on how to use the system effectively. It is worth providing this feedback to the school because they may not realise how frustrating and user-unfriendly the messaging system is. The benefit is better adherence by parents to the school's spam messages.

I LOVE technology.

I HATE bad technology.

And as many of the posts on this thread attest to, one of the areas for which technology is very low quality is linked to children. Schools, clubs etc all jump on the tech bandwagon, but it's done very very badly. The various parent communication/payment systems being a case in point. My personal favourite being parentmail which, if you go to parentmail . com or whatever, does not offer an option for parent log on!!!!!

I think this is often a combination of lack of tech experience/knowledge on the part of the organisations trying to deploy these systems, and huge overselling by tech firms as to how brilliant they are when they talk to schools/clubs/charities etc.

A lot of the car parking apps were really really bad at first. Didn't work, slow, difficult to navigate, but I notice many have either updated or even just scrapped their original apps and moved to new ones. And now, while i still resent paying the surcharge, there's no doubt that they work very effectively.

It is worth providing this feedback to the school because they may not realise how frustrating and user-unfriendly the messaging system is

I did provide feedback in Dec 2023. I received a reply saying it was very useful feedback. It's not even worth placing a bet asking whether you think anything changed.

That's so true about schools. It's not just tech, it's los of things. Dodgy or poor quality companies come along and offer schools services and they for some reason don't seem to have any clue about making sure what they buy is actually good or works.

I think this is one of the things being part of academies is supposed to fix. Will be interesting to see. Our secondary is part of an academy and it has to be said, their various online processes are actually pretty good. NIGHTMARE to set up, but once set up, they work fairly easily and seamlessly.

Our primary has only been part of an academy for less than a year. I'm interested to see if this leads to improvements. I certainly haven't seen any yet though, but I apprecaite these tech things can be slow to evolve.

Agreed - for every thing that is made easier by tech there is something else that is actually more complicated and cumbersome imo

I think this is one of the things being part of academies is supposed to fix. Will be interesting to see.

Our academy trust talks the talk, but they don't have the resources, or staff or whatever they need to actually walk the walk.

@JadziaD that’s exactly the same issue with our parent paying site (different one).
Another issue was they recommend using the app (of course) instead of the website but I spent about two weeks back and forth with the school trying to get all my kids on the same account. No one could figure out how to do it so I can only use the website, which they clearly don’t want you to use, hence the lack of user friendliness when attempting to log in.

Thank god I now work with only minimal tech. I don’t think my nerves could stand it!

I totally get this. I too get absolutely worn out with the demands of high tech. It seems that you can't access anything these days without a password or an app. But then I suppose I'm old (61) and haven't been brought up with this stuff. I'm dreading the day when TVs won't work unless you have the Internet. I sometimes wonder how long it will be before we need an app or a password just to breathe......

My teenager doesn't understand why I get frustrated with stuff.
It's not just the tech, but it's that the tech is meant to make things smoother, faster and what have you.

Wrong - if Tesco don't trust me to do my own scanning (random bag check) then they can employ more staff.

I used to be able to put 50p in a machine and park my car.

The electronic thingy (solenoid I think) in my petrol flap failed - there was literally NO WAY to get fuel in my car. I spent 2 days - TWO DAYS - getting it fixed.

And as many of the posts on this thread attest to, one of the areas for which technology is very low quality is linked to children. Schools, clubs etc all jump on the tech bandwagon, but it's done very very badly. The various parent communication/payment systems being a case in point. My personal favourite being parentmail which, if you go to parentmail . com or whatever, does not offer an option for parent log on!!!!!

Oh god, yes. Schools efforts at IT/digital transformation are dismal and amateurish. It makes things worse. Honestly makes me weep and wastes everybody's time.

One bugbear is my son's seconday school using sharepoint sites to disseminate homework and class notes. Shocking. There are many subjects at secondary level but no coherent architecture. Each teacher uses their own folder structure and tab on sharepoint so you have to hunt around each time to find anything at all. Then the site crashes or the attachment does not open (Office365 I am looking at you). Or ds thinks he saved something then cannot find it or loses the changes.

Honestly, just dire and life shortening. So glad my ds finishes Sixth Form soon. But maybe universities are as bad ...

Booking flights and declining 1,000 offers by the airline to enhance your travel experience by booking extra suitcases, travel insurance, airport transfers etc. etc. etc.

My friend got fined last time she went off the island because she was driving through a toll road and didn't realise she needed to download an app to be able to pay, she thought she could still throw some change at the machine to make the barrier open, like the last time she had been there. She tried to sort it later but it was so complicated she decided to just pay the fine to be done with it.

I need to book a flight to Oz . I decided not to bother doing on line because i find it overwhelming with all the different alternatives about luggage etc . Am going to find a good old fashioned travel agent tomorrow and maybe pay a bit more in the knowledge that I can stop worrying !
Would be bloody happy with a good old fashioned paper ticket!!

The scrolling through countries would reduce for the majority of the UK if the Welsh and Scottish had independence. Not that is why they should.

As for the school website, I guess an outdated provider making money nicely.

being tangentially involved with app development has given me a real appreciation for well integrated digital services. Google, for instance, is miles better than Microsoft, yet I’m stuck with pigging Microsoft because my work have a multi-year contract with them, when sheets would be 100x better than excel for the job!

Also the reason providing feedback to a school website about why it’s crap is pointless, is because the school doesn’t maintain the website. Because they outsource it to another company who provides them an off-the-shelf product that they tinker with but can’t fundamentally modify all those annoying glitches and bad integrations can’t actually be changed without serious reworking of the software design. And that’s so expensive no one is going to do it.

I have an elderly mother in law who finds this all the time. We taught her to use a smartphone, yet she’s had merry hell just trying to book a simple appointment, and it definitely wasn’t any issue of her making.

PART 2

so I’m adding to my original rant, different situation.

Before I start, I just need to say I’ve had ENOUGH of dealing with huge companies who take absolutely zero accountability for their incompetence and who are utterly faceless and non-human.

The smaller the company, the more direct and human the interaction, the better the outcome. It might be slower - but who cares! Quality over speed, competence, compassion & accountability over buck-passing.

I just had a rant with a (lovely) woman who is on the receiving end of customer complaints, and thank god she was sympathetic or I would have totally lost my rag.

Breakdown company I’d booked a repair with to come to my house and have been waiting for all day didn’t turn up - and why? Because their system cancelled my booking without telling me, despite me having a confirmation email. Useless automated system.

At times you need an actual human to interact with the actual paying customer.

Their apology had better be good.

I want to cry!

I feel your pain .

Absolutely exhausting and dehumanising and time wasting and boring. Never simple, never does what you want it to…. hate, hate, hate this “ more efficient “ society

So why do we put up with it? What can we do differently? Buy local? Support smaller and local businesses?