My wife and are are currently dabbling in the Byzantine Empire. We understand that everyone else has been living in it for some time, but bear with us. Perhaps our experiences will ring some distant bell in your memory of the beforetimes, when people dealt with people, and liked it. I’ll explain.
We sold our house. We are out on the loose, darkening unfamiliar doorsteps and towels. We’re renting things. We’re paying for things we normally don’t encounter, like bad meals, which seem to be the only kind available at any price in any restaurant we can find. We’ve discovered that nothing is straightforward anymore. Everything we remember is the same thing with extra steps. Exasperating, hinky, cellphone steps.
To rent a house, we dealt with an online service that sent us to a pair of invisible overlords who first decided in some opaque fashion if they wanted our money. They eventually relented and said it had the correct, more obscure presidents on it. Then they dutifully emailed us the wrong combination to the front door. Well, not right away. The first time they sent us a link that opened their online insurance policy instead of the front door. When we inquired whether they were expecting more trouble from us than we were planning on delivering, they apologized, in please don’t knock off a star language, and then sent us the wrong keycode.
So 20 hours after starting our day at 1AM, and moving the last of all our possessions, we were standing in the sleet in front of a strange, dark door that told me over and over with angry beeps that I hadn’t said the magic word, and we couldn’t come in. We texted the mystery overlords and waited, too tired to be angry, really. They eventually got back to us, and pleaded that they had caught some form of dyslexia from a public toilet seat or something, and gave us what they hoped was the correct, descrambled version of the code. Or, they said, we could knock on the downstairs door. The actual owner of the house lives there, and could let us in. They lived in another state and had never been there. Byzantium.
A day later, we wanted to meet some relatives at a central gathering spot a few towns over from where we’re staying. It was a prominent watering hole that’s part of a converted mill building in a suddenly hip Maine suburb. We were instructed to forget about parking on the street, because the area would be jammed, and pay for parking in a garage across the street. I knew, without knowing, that this would be impossible, but I played along for comity’s sake. We pulled up to the garage with pockets full of money. There was no way to give money to a person or a machine to park there. Not even a credit or debit card. You were supposed to scan a QR code and pay using one of two execrable apps we don’t have on our phones. I know the moderne person thinks this makes things yet more moderne, but it really just makes a simple process into a Byzantine exercise.
I know you’re just supposed to immediately surrender whatever vestigal autonomy you might have left, and immediately give St. Jobs Pocket Pandora whatever it asks for, but I refused. We banged a youie and parked ten blocks away and hoofed it through a below-freezing early winter howler. Our companions wondered why we were later than expected, and filed our experience under “Our retard relatives are Amish,” like they usually do. They file their completely passive surrender to whatever their phone demands of them as being cutting edge tech savvy. I run a little web hosting business that spans two continents, and manipulate Google like it’s a toddler, but I’m an tech idiot, I gather.
But the real reason I didn’t sit in the parking garage with my teeth chattering and my fingers trembling on the phone’s keypad to download their junk apps was because I knew in my heart that no matter how much autonomy I was willing to surrender, the app wouldn’t end up working anyway. I’d be bombarded with spam forevermore, but I wouldn’t be able to park in that garage. That’s because Byzantium is never a one-step process. If you think your problems are going to be solved by just chaining yourself to their oar, you’re bound to be disappointed when the guy yells ramming speed and you’re whipped until you start rowing fast enough to suit the captain.
In our new, Byzantine world, he’s probably in another state, and has dyslexia, too. And you don’t know just how fast marring speed is.
10 Responses
I recently bought (and returned) a new printer. Out of the box, it required wifi access and product registration before it would do anything. Mind you, it had a usb port, that I was planning to use. Back into the box, and back to Wallyworld it went.
I was able to find a brand new old fashioned one on Az. Cheaper, too.
I have been told that at the local NFL stadium, you can’t buy a hot dog or a coke without scanning a QR code and paying online. I would think the concession stand would be the hot place to set up your ID theft equipment.
Last April we went to the fax Italian restaraunt. I was offered an card with QR codes. I said, we’ll be leaving. They were able to find a menu. In the stack with the rest of the menus.
Not everything new is progress.
Lots of folks have confused “progress” with “improvement.” Like water for chocolate.
I have a standard jibe when confronted with a tabletop QR code. “Whoa! Looks like your robocat ate the menu and barfed it up on my table. Can I get another menu?” Apparently this is informative enough to get me a printed menu on subsequent visits, if any.
Ah, this time a Marx Brothers (Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Zeppo, not Karl) reference: “…and never darken my towels again!”
My wife and I have cell phones. Their primary usage is when we go to the Big City to shop for cheap bulk stuff that doesn’t spoil, and use them as walkie-talkies. “Yeah, I’m over here in the paper goods section buying a single package of 4,000 rolls of paper towel. Where are you?” They’re incredibly dumb phones, and we’ve turned off everything we can figure out how to turn off. Apps? We don’t got to show you no steenkin’ apps! We’ve turned off the code readers, we’ve turned off geo-location, and when we really want to turn them off we pull the dang batteries.
Yeah, I used to run 20-million-cell CFD air flow simulations on a small super-computer, but you can call me a neo-Luddite.
Hi Blackwing- Thanks for reading and commenting and noticing things. A lot of Marx Brothers jokes were written by a guy named S.J. Perelman, a very amusing fellow. I’ve read he and Groucho hated each other, but worked together anyway.
Related, and from one of my favorite financial explainers, Patrick Boyle, who recently posted a bit on “Tech Bros Inventing Things That Already Exist”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jhTnk3TCtc
His dry as a bone delivery is something special, and should feel familiar.
Hi El Polacko- Thanks for reading and commenting and offering interesting links.
I’d never heard of Patrick Boyle. In fairness, I imagine he’s never heard of me, either.
I used to visit my mom almost every day at the assisted living facility and often she would be in tears because all she wanted to do was watch Everybody loves Raymond on television and her remote control had 39 buttons.
I did some research to see if anybody still made old style televisions with a knob to change the channels and a button that turned it on and off and control the volume and they do not exist. I understand perfectly well why they do not exist,
but it seems to me everything has become unnecessarily complicated, expensive and dangerous.
Imagine going somewhere and having to use the QR code in your phone to park your car and end up losing your financial information because it’s a scam and thieves drain your bank account.
Last year, three different banks sent me a letter in the mail that they were closing my bank account and I do not have an account with any of them. You can only imagine the fun I had trying to contact people at the bank about the situation when they would answer the call from Bombay and immediately want to know my bank account number and my social security number or as they would say “my sosha” when I told him I wasn’t going to give them my “sosha” and needed to speak to someone about how I never had an account with them they would hang up on me. In one case five times.
Every night before I go to bed. I look at a website called Shorpie that has very old black-and-white photographs from a long time ago and I’m convinced that if I had the opportunity I would like to go back to live in 1905. It had just enough technology to make the world livable
but the world had not gone crazy yet. At least by the look of things.
Those 1905 Shorpy photos show well-built, handsome buildings that have lasted longer than the “modern” glass towers ever will.
Hiya Gringo- If you like Shorpy photos, you’re gonna love our new place.
In 2000 my hubby and I visited my 80 year old mother in her sunny retirement community. She had a wonderful new television with a remote control that was very easy to use. For Christmas that year she gifted us with the same type/style of remote control. I tried to activate it and then DH tried to get it running. He being a man who had dealt with electronics in the US Navy I expected it to be easy for him. It was not.
Finally, he said, “call your mom and find out what we need to do.” To which I responded in terror, ” I am a 56 year old woman ! I can’t call MY MOTHER!” His response was cooly analytical, ” well, I can’t call her I am the one with the PH.D!”
FWIW we have not been in full control of any television we have had since then.