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Entering the Era of Crummy Technology

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(Not So) Smart Phones

Little did I think way back around 1964 when I was fooling around with a General Electric 265 computer at Dartmouth College that computer technology would become so prevalent sixty years later. I moved from being an English Major in 1966 to seeking a Master of Arts in film history and criticism at UCLA in Los Angeles to becoming a self trained computer programmer in 1968 at System Development Corporation (SDC) in Santa Monica, California.

From there I moved on being a computer programmer for Urban Decision Systems in 1971, morphing into a Director of Corporate Communications to avoid working directly under the president’s thumb. When that went bust in 1991, I became an Network Administrator and Office Manager for a Westwood accounting firm, which lasted until the end of 2017.

I am now retired after a lifetime with computers. As I look around me today, I find technology everywhere—from automated attendant services that make it a 45-minute ordeal to telephone a corporation to expensive smart phones that are inferior in quality to the old Bell land lines to error-prone GPS systems to touch-screen interfaces that force you to repeat your keystrokes endlessly.

Tomorrow, I will have to pay a Blue Cross bill over the phone—and I dread the interaction with their automated attendant. They refuse to make it easy to pay them unless I let them auto-fill all my prescriptions. Even when my doctor changes medications or dosages.

I own a flip phone, but not a smart phone. Being a senior, I cannot read the tiny screens without changing to my reading glasses. If I were an eight-armed Hindu deity, it would be no trouble at all. But, alas, I am a mere human.

At SDC, I wrote three hefty user manuals. Now I find that user manuals are hard to come by. If you can’t find a portable data file (pdf) version on the Internet, you have to just fly by the seat of your pants. I guess people just don’t like to read any more.

What frightens me is not that we advance three steps forward and two steps back, but two steps forward and three steps back.

Dysinventions

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I Wish Touchscreen Keyboards Could Be Uninvented

I Wish Touchscreen Keyboards Could Be Uninvented

There are wonderful inventions that make things easy for people. Then there are what I call dysinventions, or bad inventions, that while seeming to advance technology actually represent a step backward. One prominent example is the touchscreen keyboard. I could see the thought forming in the inventor’s mind: “Why not get rid of the clunky keyboard and just have people hit letters on a keyboard that appears on the screen?”

Well now, that’s just ducky for texting, twittering, and other forms of second-tier communications; but I could not enter this blog on such a quasi-keyboard. Let’s take yesterday’s blog, for example. I would have to type the name of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull without the umlaut over the “o”. Eyjafjallajokull would probably look okay to most people, but it is wrong to me; and I insist on absolute correctness. To get the letter, I hit Alt-0246 on my keyboard. To get the em dash in the third paragraph, I type Alt-0151 instead of the double hyphen (“- -”) using the old typewriter convention.

I feel bad enough that there are some Eastern European diacritical marks I can’t use, such as an anacrusis or the Hungarian double-acute-accent over the “o” and “u” to indicate an extended vowel sound. In time, I will figure this out. But not on one of those touchscreen keyboards. I can imagine it would be gruelling just to type an average paragraph shifting between upper and lower case letters and numbers, let alone diacritical marks.

If I can’t make it look as if it were typeset, I would just as soon forget the whole thing. It just wouldn’t be me.

And that is why I don’t travel with an iPad or similar “crippled computer.”