Fasab Talks Techno – Part One, “Hello there!”

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Today I’m talking techo, well sort of.

As time moves on – and it’s moving on far too fast – more and more things tend to irritate me.

The stupidity and bureaucracy we have to endure is the thing that inspired this blog in the first place and that remains a huge thorn in my side. I have made many comments on that subject and given the opportunity will no doubt make many more.

But another thing that pisses me off more and more is almost the opposite of stupidity – it is people trying to be too damn smart.

Nowhere is this more noticeable than in the technology that we use today.

Now, I’m not a technophobe by any stretch of the imagination. I love my computers and the advent of the internet was one of the greatest things ever, as far as I was concerned. Indeed I have blogged in the past about my long love affair with computers  click here to read it.

Maybe it’s because of that long love affair, because I have been involved with computers for so many years, that what is happening now irritates me so much.

What I’m talking about is the fact that today’s personal computers and tablets and telephones and all the other periphery of techo gadgets try to do far too much for their owners. Everyone who has one of these machines is apparently a moron, or at least that’s how the manufacturers seem to treat us.

In the good old days you actually had to work at making your computer do things. Your telephone in those days made telephone calls and that was about it. And tablets were the things the doctor prescribed when you were feeling poorly.

To cut what could well turn into a very long list of current irritations into a manageable size, let me concentrate on just a few of the most horrible things that we now have to face.

In fact, rather than go on and on I’ll split this post over a few days.

Today it’s telephones.

Like I just said, I remember the days when phones were used to make phone calls – seemed logical enough to us at the time. Now they do all sorts of things. You can still phone people when you figure out how, but now you can also text, surf the internet, send and receive video messages and calls, play games, buy stuff – in fact almost everything you can do on your computer you can now do on a smart phone. And most of them have reasonable quality cameras too.

For a while those who could afford a cell phone were lumbered with a thing the size of a brick and it weighed almost as much too!

You can see one of those in the photo below (far left!). You can still get them, or rather a modern version if you want to draw a bit of attention to yourself – and there are always people who do.

As the years went on the phones kept getting smaller and smaller. That was good for a while. They became light and pocket sized. But miniaturization became the trend, and cell phones got really really really small to the extent that unless you had the fingers of a five year old child instead of chubby man paws it was a struggle to find the right numbers to make a call and a nightmare to send a text.

Then, mainly because of the advance of wifi and 3G and 4G and so forth, cell phones started to get bigger again to the extent that they are nearly back to the size of that brick again, albeit a lot thinner and lighter. Glasses are the next step, with a heads up view just like on the helmet visors of those jet fighters you see in the movies. And sometime in the not too distant future you will just need a silicone chip embedded at the back of your ear-hole. Not sure I’ll go for that last one though.

That’s a potted history of the cell phone, but now for the really irritating part.

When texting really took off and became the most popular form of communication when using a cell phone, someone – they won’t tell me his name probably for his own safety – decided that we needed help writing a text. Not what I call a “speel chekkar” that is available on your computer – which would have been acceptable – but a much more sinister and annoying invention.

Guessed what it is yet?

Yes, it’s “auto-correct” or as it likes to call itself “anal cortex”.

I hate this thing with a passion. I disconnect it on every device I can because it doesn’t work!

Auto-correct has not the slightest idea what you are trying to say. It is unnecessary, frustrating, irritating and useless.

It has only one saving grace that I have found.

Sometimes it’s funny.

If you are not likely to be offended by strong language, have a look at some of the examples below and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

Enjoy.

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