Things that worked better in the old days

[blondeseaside]

Just been for a drive thru Mcdonalds. In the good old days, the whole menu would be hanging above the car on a metal sign. What do we have now? One big screen that just shows a couple of menu "highlights", so it only showed one wrap, one burger....so yeah, we get that you do burgers and wraps, but which ones? Where is the full menu? There are 16 burger types at Mcdonalds, but only 1 burger was on the screen. There are 4 wrap types, but only the Tikka one was on the screen (so I ordered that). How on earth are you meant to know what you want to order, if they only show a fraction of the menu? I asked Gemini and she said you're meant to look at the menu on your phone now....but I am driving!

First world problem, but it did my head in!

I don’t mind the banking app as it does work.
It’s sad that branches in the high street have died out though. Pushed more work onto post offices.
The high street isn’t what it once was either.

Humans functioned better back in the days before their brains turned to mush by over exposure to screens and apps.

Getting an appointment at a GPs surgery!

I remember phoning the GP in my early 20s having just moved to a very rural area. I thought that the surgery was still open and the Dr picked the phone up and explained that they were closed and the calls were diverted to his home in the evenings in case there was an emergency and he was about to have his tea. I was 😮.

The apps and screens have been pushed onto us though. Everything is online. You can’t escape it at all.
They do have us where they want us.

Everyone had an NHS dentist.

I have a jacket I bought to wear on a holiday in 1992. It is still in regular use.

Clothes shopping. On the high street. It used to be such an enjoyable day out. Now there’s no nice clothes. They’re all expensive. Shops aren’t an experience anymore, just warehouses with racks of polyester. Christmas is in your face. It’s just grim… I remember how lovely London was during the festive season. It’s just not the same now! Plus all of the self checkouts, can we have your email, do you have the app etc… Online shopping is boring!

Streetcargo
Now usually I like full stops and capital letters.
Your post came across really well without them though, and I became angry on oue behalf reading it because it is so true. 😫

Sound quality on TVs as well. Drives me nuts. I understand why (as in the mechanics of the issue) but still really irritating.

Dialogue on TV...
I can't cope with watching dingy mumbling dramas anymore.

Parking. You could just put coins in a machine to pay. No endless apps that never seem to work.

Spontaneity has gone out the window. You have to book everything in advance so instead of deciding on a whim due to the weather, you have to go even if it's pishing rain.

Apps for absolutely everything. "Are you happy ordering your meal on our app?" No I'll order from a human thanks.

I hate the assumption that everything needs to be connected to the internet - and that there is a 'fault' if you haven't done so.

I'm not going to lie, I love the internet and much prefer life with it than without it; but it's insane to think that every single appliance has to be connected by default - and that they're programmed to nag you that they aren't connected, as though you're utterly stupid, when you've made a conscious decision not to connect them yet/ever.

Also the same stupid tech that assumes you are stupid and don't know how to input a card number, date or password, and will scream at you that it's incorrect or invalid with every single key press until the last one. If every keyboard had one single key for every potential password, email address, date of birth, phone number and whatever, every keyboard would be the size of Liechtenstein.

Now, they're 'progressing' beyond just telling you off when something that doesn't need to be connected to the internet isn't connected to the internet; it's all AI. I realise that AI does have some uses for very long, tedious logarithmic tasks where a human's brain and time would be wasted, and that lots of people now are too lazy to think for themselves and want a robot to be their mummy in every little thing... but STOP assuming that I want to use it for everything, and taking away my options to not use it and do something that benefits from human brain power myself.

Outlook in particular is blatant: where they've started making you sign in randomly again and again, and when you hover over to the 'sign in' button, you get blocked by THREE sodding Copilot buttons, none of which I ever want to use. I also prefer to read my emails myself and not have a robot 'summarise' them, as constantly urged. This even happens with emails from Microsoft themselves, who have presumably already used Copilot to summarise them before sending them to me. AI is going to make people thicker and thicker very quickly, until the point where we're just useless bags of meat needlessly hanging around and getting in AI's way of doing everything that we used to do to run the world.

Booking fees are absolute legalised robbery. I remember the old days when you could either go to the box office in person (no fee other than the actual price of the tickets) OR phone them and they would send them to you, for the price of the tickets, an envelope and a stamp - perfectly fair.

Nowadays, no human is involved at all and I have to find, select, pay for and download my tickets myself... so remind me what the £4 'booking fee' was for again...? And don't you even dare tell me that it's to pay for your facility to take my payment by card (the only option, as it's online). This is an absolute basic, predictable, essential business overhead for you; Tesco don't sell me a tin of beans for the price on the shelf and then add on a fee to pay for the lorry that took them to the store, or the lighting in the store, or for the sheer pleasure and privilege of actually paying them to be able to buy stuff from them.

Not a huge long timescale with the 'then and now' of this one... but you know how phones used to all come with a headphone socket as standard; and how it's now an endemic problem with so many people playing their music and videos loudly in public and forcing everybody else to hear them... I wonder if there might be a correlation there at all?!

The booking fee really grates because its not optional! If - like you say - you could pitch up and collect the ticket and avoid the booking fee then fair enough....but its literally the only option. And then they have how would you like your ticket delivered....but e-ticket is the only option. Why tf are you asking me how I would like it delivered when there literally isnt a choice!!

One concert i went to the app had a problem - cue several hundred middle aged women looking dismally at their phones as the tickets just disappeared....then we all had to be ushered out to the booking office to then be told to download another app, and try x,y or z and then magically the tickets reappeared....meanwhile we missed most of the warm up act. Thanks 02.

I'm amazed they seem so oblivious to how unhappy and ripped off people feel when they persist with a booking fee. If they added the extra money that they wanted to the price of the tickets, rather than deviously chuck in the extra fee, most people wouldn't even notice, much less care. If they'd have paid, say, £110 for a ticket, they would almost certainly have paid £115 with the same readiness... and no deliberate betrayal of customer goodwill by seeking to rinse them for a few underhand quid more at the end.

Unfortunately, you just know that, if venues did decide to opt for a more honest, transparent approach and do away with booking fees and add a few quid to the standard price of a ticket instead... before long, somebody would come up with the 'bright new' wheeze of adding a booking fee, without the remotest thought of reducing the now-standard ticket price to balance it out.

This is probably a bizarre analogy, but I always remember an old episode of Golden Balls which had been a nightmare for the contestants, meaning that their final jackpot fund was only something like £3.50, so clearly no point whatsoever in causing bad feeling (and outing yourself as untrustworthy and a liar on national TV) by stealing... yet this one woman did go ahead and choose steal, insisting that it was the principle and she just wanted to take as much as she possibly could get away with.

Vacuum cleaners. They used to have real power which meant you could vacuum a room far quicker as you didn’t have to keep going over the same bits several times.

Washing machines. Used to be far quicker when you could plumb them into the hot water pipes instead of them taking ages to warm up cold water and then doing glacially slow washes.

Customer service where you could easily go into or phone a local shop or office and get your issue sorted instead of horrendous call centres that take 2 hours to answer your call then either cut you off or they’re not concentrating due to wfh with kids or dogs in the background or offshored to Outer Mongolia to people who have no idea how to solve the problem.

Try a Miele vacuum cleaner - they're made 'like they used to be'; but don't go for the convenience of bagless and in so doing sacrifice efficiency and power!

We have our broadband with a small, niche ISP and, if you need to call them, a person in an office in Bracknell or Abergavenny (not a call centre) answers in 2 or 3 rings and says "Hello, X Broadband", before resolving your query/problem. They may need to transfer you to e.g. Sales, if you've called Accounts; but they put you straight through to an actual person. It always feels so amazingly other-worldly whenever I need to call them; but there was a time when every single company - however big or small - would be like that by default!

Please please tell me who your provider is!!

Absolutely agree. Drama schools
clearly don't teach enunciation any longer.

Pets and vets. Get a puppy or kitten from someone local and use the local vet when needed for a reasonable cost.
Now it’s designer breeds and puppy farms and Big Vet companies that run on insurance claims and manipulating people to use unnecessary services. £400 to polish your cats teeth. Because they live on pouch mush.

Social housing. Local properties for local people when needed. Now we have multi million £ scams and systems designed for some landlords to rinse the taxpayer via the benefits system.

Me too!

It’s changed so much hasn’t it? Even 20 years ago it wasn’t this bad. I hate the complication of everything. Like if I wanted to go swimming even 10 years ago I’d go to the local baths at the time I wanted to swim and pay to swim. Now you have to download the app, they release the dates 7 days in advance so you have to book that day or it sells out. You can’t ever wake up and think I fancy going swimming today. And god forbid you want to enquire about something, the phone lines are 10-12 and 3-5 Monday Wednesday and Thursday. And no one ever answers! Emails are 10 day reply. And that just swimming, doctors appointments, gig tickets, restaurants, parking all have similar specifics to their services.
it reaches a point where I think I can’t be arsed I’ll not bother.

The other day I made the mistake of just popping down to my local swimming pool because i fancied a swim. I didn't know anything about the swimming booking thing.

The man on reception was looking at me like I had two heads when I said "I've just popped in for a swim".

He had to reluctantly manually book me in for swimming. When I got through to the pool, there were about seven people in it.

Ridiculous and not at all conducive to encouraging healthy lifestyles and physical activity.