Does Technology Get Your Goat?

In our digitally loaded lives, it’s hard to imagine what we would do without technology. We wouldn’t, for instance, be able to check our email every five minutes if there were no email. On the contrary, it’s not much difficult to imagine that we would achieve certain things faster if tech didn’t play spoilsport.

We’ve all read with sympathetic fervor about the system-bashing tendencies that a hung computer induces in the most non-violent of workers. There was a short video clip, even, in which a man literally pounds on his machine and throws it off his desk. Poor chap.

Over time, I’ve compiled my own hate-list of instances when technology, instead of increasing our productivity, increases our brain temperature by unwelcome degrees. Sometimes I wonder if the gadgets, networks and software come together in a combined conspiracy against workerkind.

Let me begin the ordeal with the good old telephone. Suppose you are trying to concentrate on something that seems important and the telephone rings. You choose to ignore it for sometime but, after many unrelenting rings, decide to pick it up. And there you are! Soon as you pick up the darned thing, it stops ringing. No matter how many rings you allow to pass, the moment you pick it up, it goes silent when it really wants to annoy you.

Things are no better when you are dialing in, especially the customer service of a telecom or banking company. With most companies now using IVR (interactive voice response or irritating voice re-routing, take your pick), it seems easier to get access to George Bush than the company’s customer rep. Some IVRs are especially configured to avoid giving you any option to talk to somebody – or the option is hidden deep down several press-this-key-and-press-that-key loops. At times, when you finally get down to hearing the human “hello” on the other end, you are so tired punching buttons that you just ask the person to hang up.

Those who are used to exercising their fingers on mobiles for SMSes would also have encountered this next item on my agenda. It’s called “Message not sent this time” – an error you get after your attempt to send an SMS results in failure. So you try another time, and another, and yet another time – until you see the message fly away from your outbox. Ultimately, you end up getting an SMS from the party you are trying to reach: “Stop spamming me, will you!”

The Internet offers its own share of irritating tricks to unsuspecting users.

“Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and will be shut down” screams the message bang in the middle of the screen – just when you thought you found what you were Googling for. Now, your only option is to tell Microsoft about this problem through a link. But irrespective of what you tell those nerds or what they later do about it (if anything), all your IE windows will be shut down. No, sir, you can’t do zilch about it, thank you very much for reporting this problem!

Automatic page refresh is another trick that can make you go bonkers while you are in the middle of reading something on a web page. I do not doubt the good intentions of the developers who wanted an automatic mechanism to update the page so the surfer gets current information. But imagine the spark of fulmination an automatic refresh causes when you are suddenly taken to the top of the page from wherever you were in your reading. You have to inch your way back to that place – and hurry up reading the page if you don’t want to be hit by the refresh wave again.

I could go on about umpteen other Netty things that get my dander up – and probably yours too. But at the moment, in another window open on my desktop, I’m just trying to figure out the stupid blurry characters in a patch that I must copy into the registration field of a website to prove that I’m not a bot. Darn!