Grumpy old man rants about the digital age

One of the things that p***es me off from our wonderful digital are clocks. You know the type, they have numbers on them, glow green or red in the dark, and usually incorporate an alarm of some description. I miss the good old type with the hands going around, and sometimes a peal of bells hidden inside.

What annoys me about these digital clocks is that if they are a minute or two fast and you want to put the time right, there is no way you can go back in a couple of clicks. You instead have to go through the whole 24-hour sequence, minus the two or so minutes mentioned earlier. Even more frustrating though, is that should you inadvertently go just a minute more than the required time you then have to go through the damn set all over again!

It can’t possibly be beyond the wit of electronics designers to include another button on the clock that goes ‘back’ instead of ‘forward. Imagine the time this would save (no pun intended), if you could simply go in reverse for a minute or two.

Then there’s my wonderful Samsung smartphone. It has the charging socket at the bottom of the unit, which is okay as far as I’m concerned, but then they put a tiny little cover over the socket, to keep water out, in case you drop it in a puddle or something. The trouble is, because of the way it’s designed, I need to let the forefinger nail of my right hand grow a little longer than all my others, so that I have something to slip under that lid to open it. Is it impossible to make that socket waterproof, so that it doesn’t need a lid? Apple seem to have solved the problem quite satisfactorily — the charging socket of an iPhone is in much the same place as my Samsung, but they have no lid protecting it, and they don’t issue any warning either, telling the owner to avoid getting the unit anywhere near water, because there is no lid.

My next gripe is about the Telstra TV, a neat little box that slips under my television set, turning it from an ordinary, high definition set into a smart one, able to pick up all manner of stations as well as the free to air ones. I got one a few months ago and I have to admit, it’s marvellous to be able to now tune into Netflix, Foxtel, Stan and all the other streaming shows, like the ‘replays’ of programs you might have missed in real-time and want to catch up on (though you do have to pay for a lot of these services, of course).

The trouble is, in their wisdom, the people who made this unit for Telstra, decided that no operating manual was required — you’re just left to work out for yourself what all the buttons on the remote are for. It’s taken me several months to become familiar with the workings and in the meantime, if I pressed a wrong one, that buggered the unit and I had to go through, reloading the whole system again, just as if the unit had only recently arrived. It meant I was looking up a load of code numbers… and having to remember their various passwords. It’s not just me either, our son, who is pretty savvy with modern electronics, came to stay last weekend and he managed to press a couple of wrong buttons too, so I had to reprogram it once again — really good fun!

I own a VW Passat, a lovely car and my pride and joy, but even that has so many electronic features that I sometimes can’t keep up with its thinking. It beeps, somewhat irritably, at me if I fall behind and argumentative words appear on the tiny red screen right in the centre of my dashboard. At the moment it’s going through a phase of telling my I’m low on coolant, but I’ve checked and there is plenty of fluid there, and my thermometer is exactly in the middle of its scale, where it’s supposed to be. My garage tells me not to worry, it’s just a minor glitch in the computer, but what happens when I do as he says and then the little red light flashes with a genuine problem; how do I recognise the difference?

I guess I’m just getting too old to be able to act sensibly in the digital age, I’ll just have to grin and bear it, or always take a four-year-old kid with me — he’d have it all solved in minutes, I‘m sure!

How do you cope wit so much of the ‘every day’ being digital? What annoys you about technology?

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