To be so drained and fed up of constant electronic forms and passwords and apps?

[Bananabreadandcupofcoffeethanks]

Hate it so much I can't express it. Nothing works right for me, you need a fairly recent smartphone for apps to work for example.

Then with electronic forms. Fuck me. I'm trying to fill in a whole complicated form for an appointment and cannot get the 'electronically fillable' form to work. So now I have to print it, and hope the printer works, and then take a photo and scan or something.

I don't have the energy to do this now. It is now a whole multi step process with lots of little bits to get the task done.

I just fucking hate it all when it comes to appointments and job applications and whatnot, and then everything needing an app, or an account with a password that needs xyz to meet criteria.

God needed to get that off my chest.

My dad has no mobile phone at all. My mum has an elderly 'brick' phone which is kept switched off, but she takes it out with her in case she needs to make an emergency phone call. I think she uses it about once a year on average.

Really?

I actually cried the other day when I went somewhere new and couldn’t pay by phone to park. I don’t use cash, I never have coins. I was in a huge rush for a stressful medical appointment and I just didn’t have the capacity for it. I haven’t used coins to park for about 5 years.

I do everyday online but agree that bad electronic forms are particularly irritating though. As are differing password requirements. There should be a universal format in terms of character minimum and special characters.

I only got a phone last September. Used iPads and laptop for bank/ government stuff and most things still use bank cards.

However increasingly you NEED a mobile number for online forms so I had too.

Its not just the faff of passwords. Phones and keypads are small which is shit with my poor eyesight, they require charging, they break or get lost. Also expensive. Cash might get lost or stolen but it doesn’t cost anything to carry it round.

The reliance on phones now is bad news I think.

Ive just moved over here and find I need apps and tech way more than i did in Australia. Which I don’t hugely mind except I seem to have fucking awful phone signal everywhere I go. So I have a plug in hybrid car and I like plugging it in when I go to the shops.
However, at my local Sainsbury’s, there’s no signal outside, so to use the charger I have to park, go into the store, open wifi, choose the charger point, start it going, go back outside and plug in the car. WTF? Madness.
Why can’t I just wave my payment card in front of a charging point and pay? Why do I need a bloody app?
Also, the number of car parks where I have to guess how long I’ll be. In Australia the car park just photographs your number platé as you go in, and you pay when you leave. So much easier. I know some places are like this but it so happens that my favourite car park (the only one which has car chargers AND a phone signal) I have to pay in advance.
The other thing that really bothers me is how easy it is to basically never speak to another human. I don’t know many people and sometimes I’ll go 8 hours and barely speak to another human - and now that a lot of cafes have this fecking awful QR code ordering you don’t even get the mild interactions from speaking to someone.
Even in Sainsbury's I don’t speak to a human as I use the smart shop app. I mean, I know I could NOT use it, but often it gives me 20-25% off certain things so why wouldn’t I?
I definitely feel that tech has slipped from adding value to our life to making it basically worse.
And don’t get me started on my goddamn car! Every time I start the car I have to disable the “lane assist” so I don’t get repeatedly dragged into cyclists on country lanes. Plus to turn up the heat I have to press about 4 buttons on the touch screen instead of just twisting a knob. Awful!

I definitely feel that tech has slipped from adding value to our life to making it basically worse.

I think that sums it up perfectly.

+1

Needing a smart phone and apps to conduct normal everyday operations is nothing like the same as needing money!
Firstly while not everyone has enough money, money is not complicated to use or understand. You don't need good eyesight or manual dexterity. You don't need working cognitive skills, a machine that relies on electricity to keep it going, ever increasing space on that device, a new enough decide to support upgrades or a mobile signal to money.
Aside from all that, money( cash) doesn't collect information about everything you do and connect all that information to try and sell you shit.
Sure things move on, but not always in the right direction.

I have issued vouchers to people to top up their phone data when I volunteer in our local resource centre (associated with the food bank).
There are schemes (have a look at the Trussell trust) who aim to provide people struggling with devices and connectivity.

Just because you don't know anyone doesn't mean it's not an issue.

The worst one is buying food on an app whilst sitting in a restaurant. Cold clinical and just odd.

This is all getting very Blake 7.

I've 2 pages of passwords and still get the text or email with an additional code. Sick of it all

I agree - I’ll never do that. Like, I have food at home. Part of going out isn’t just getting food, it’s sitting, being friendly to the waiting staff, having that interaction etc.
Also, people say that younger people aren’t so good at being social these days, but these jobs are the ones that young people get. If the options for waiting tables, working in maccas, checkouts etc goes away, how will they learn these vital social skills?
Even in maccas now you just order on the screen and they just hand your food to you. I’m sure it’s better for profits but it makes for such a lonely and isolating life.

Parking bloody apps! Not one company the same and you're trying to download at the seaside where coverage is crap

I avoid anywhere that uses a QR code

*The worst one is buying food on an app whilst sitting in a restaurant. Cold clinical and just odd.

This is all getting very Blake 7*

I was in a restaurant recently that had a QR code for a menu. I point blank refused. All this stuff is presumably to make our lives easier. It really doesn't.

Parking bloody apps! Not one company the same and you're trying to download at the seaside where coverage is crap

Yep. Was once in tears of frustration trying to download one in the middle of the Lake District, nearly missing a boat trip. Stressful!

Another one that drives me insane is apps that require you to upload a photo from your phone but then say the file size is too big. I had this when claiming compensation for a train delay. I had to upload a photo of the ticket from my phone but it refused to accept it because it was too big. This is a standard photo from a standard phone. If they can't accept them why demand it?! I gave up in the end, which I suspect is part of their strategy for reducing claims.

Went to Nando's before Christmas. It was dark and raining so rushed in and joined the queue in the lobby. Got to the front of the queue and the server asked our party name so gave him our name and he looks on his tablet and says "I can't see you in the queue." It seems we were supposed to scan a QR code on the outside of the building (in the rain) which put us in the queue. Loads of people were behind us who were apparently more in the queue than we were because they had done the QR code and it would be a half hour wait. We went somewhere else in the end. Utterly ridiculous. I have a degree in computer science and am only 42 so happily do apps for many things but it just seems so overly complicated to computerise a queue that you are standing in and have no option for people who don't have a smart phone or run out of battery or broken it or whatever.

@DizzyRascal oh absolutely. I went to the virtual realms exhibition at the Barbican a few years ago and was completely shocked by how wholly uncritical it was, very surface-level: "oh look how great all this face recognition technology is, btw the Chinese government use it to detain Uyghur people, isn't that cool, now look at this shiny bit of ML, let's play a game with it".

And yes, growing up in the 90s my experience of tech was creative, people-led and expansive. I lost interest around the time the balance shifted heavily to algorithms. Showing our age, well yes, showing our knowledge things were not always this way!

I went to a running race this morning in a country park. You have to pay to park.

BUT you can pay by coins, card and app. It's really not that hard to offer all three.

The QR thing really is just a gimmick. I went to a cycling event last year and needed to register on the day. They only had a QR code to register, which I found really difficult to use (now I have a phone which does it via Google Lens). Would it really have been that hard to have the website address to hand as well?

it's fundamentally wrong that you need a mobile internet enabled device to basically function in society

My employer is moving to a new office later this year. In the current one, we have an ID card. In the new one, you've guessed it, we will have to have an app on our phone to get in!

This is often because phones ramp up the camera megapixels in the mistaken belief this equals great quality pictures. No, 60MP just equals huge file size and unless you intend to enlarge your photos to the size of billboards, is a complete waste of space. Of course, you use more data/storage space with them too, which is a potential way they can squeeze more money out of you ...

I don't always take it with me though. For example, if I go swimming. I don't leave it sitting in the car or the locker while I am in the pool. Much safer to leave it at home. If the leisure centre car park decided to charge for parking via app or only allow access via app it would be a real pain.

The assumption that everyone carries round a phone with them at all times is mistaken.

Facebook went down last year. To get into the datacentre to fix it, Facebook engineers had to use Facebook ID to get in. But Facebook was down. So they couldn't get in.

*Allegedly

We are expected to have an app on our personal phones to authenticate our access to our laptop accounts. Only certain roles (very very few) have work phones as the powers that be got rid of corporate mobiles as a cost cutting exercise.

I have a work phone but not sure what happens if you refuse to do so. I’ve always found this to be a massive overstep and I’m quite pro mobile technology.