Well, it’s 2020, and the future is here. Self-driving cars and trucks, wars being fought -and started- with robots, VR gaming setups, and all kinds of fancy gadgets that would have our ancestors burning, stoning, and drowning us for practicing witchcraft. And yet, somehow, we still find ourselves inundated with out of date behaviors and objects, things that should have long ago gone the way of our children’s future, and yet they persist in their pestilence. Problems that, by any practical measurement, should have been solved long before we figured out how to put cartoon dog ears on pictures of ourselves.
I started thinking about this the other day when, due to occupational obligations, I was forced to make a phone call using a land based phone line. The area code attached to the number I needed to dial was unfamiliar to me, and thus I assumed I would be required to dial a ‘1’ before dialing the number itself, an odd process used to dial long distance numbers. Now, one might be thinking that I’m about to lament how we’ve failed to overcome the need for dialing ‘1’, but one would be wrong about that one. Instead, I am personally bereft at how, as happened to me, the lovely robotic female voice interrupts the call to inform one that it is not necessary for one to dial ‘1’ when calling this number, and then hangs up on one.
What I want to know is, how have we not managed to patch up our phone system so that instead of hanging up on us and forcing us to redial, it just dials the number and leaves us to our phone call? We have refrigerators that autocorrect the shopping list we type into the smart screen installed on the door before sending the list to our phones, so why in the name of Jacob Perkins am I still required to listen to this robot lady tell me I’m a fool and then rudely hang up on me?
Speaking of things I’m tired of hearing, how are we not beyond chewing gum? I know it’s not necessarily a technology thing, but come on, there has to be a better solution to breath freshening than chewing on a wad of semi-edible rubber that tastes like mint for 3 minutes and then like nothing until you finally remember you can spit it out and be done with it. Surely we can invent something that people won’t chew on with their flapping maws and make some of the sloppiest, slobberiest audial nightmares in the history of the universe. Just thinking about it makes me irritatingly tense.
Though, I have to admit, not as tense as the last thing I want to bring up today, which is spam email. I’m pretty sick of how I can’t visit a website, read an article, or, in an even creepier invasion of privacy, physically go somewhere without getting all kinds of “special offers” in my electronic mailbox. I know privacy is a thing of the past, and there are ad blockers and spam blockers one can buy, yes. And that’s great. But my notion is this: I shouldn’t have to pay money to get rid of a thing I never wanted in the first place. This, by the way, is also a decent argument for universal healthcare, but I digress. I’m tired of having to empty out my junk box everyday; that junkbox is for unimportant things real people send me, not your stupid “15% off your next pair of jeans, after purchasing five at regular price”, or “free shipping on all orders over $250”, or whatever version of “give us more money” you’ve cooked up this week, okay? If I want to buy your junk, I have the entire internet to help me figure out how. And if I’ve already bought some of your junk, I obviously know where to get it, so stop bothering me.
At the very least, we should be able to look up exactly who sells our data to whom, so we can decide who gets it in the first place. Or start forwarding our spam to them, so those leeches can see what it’s like.
Anyway. I’m just saying that if we’ve managed to get ourselves to the point of jetpacks -they exist now, look for yourself- we should at least be able to knock out a few of these minor cultural defects that take our valuable time away from making our direction apps sound like famous people.
-John
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