The modern world allows us to discover new and exciting ways of being humiliated every day. I recently had an such an experience when receiving costly gas bills: the property I lived in had no gas. Quite a simple fix, you’d think, as the entire block of one-bedroom flats was powered only by electricity and a vague aura of loneliness.
I called the energy provider and spoke to a lovely staff member who quickly agreed this was an error. “Not a problem!” she told me. “I’ll just need you to send me a photo to show there is no gas meter, with evidence of the date. Could you get a copy of today’s newspaper?” I paused before clarifying: “You need me to take a photo holding today’s newspaper standing next to a nonexistent gas meter?” We both laughed. Oh, how we laughed. We shared a laugh so powerful I began to suspect there actually was gas in my building and it was leaking directly into my flat. “Um. I do need that though,” she confirmed once all joy had dissipated. “The system won’t allow me to proceed unless I upload a photo.”
You probably know what it feels like to be subjugated by technology. Maybe you forgot an account password and had to click the dreaded “forgot password” link that sends a text containing a code to your mobile phone. You must then whisper this code into a bottle and hurl it out to sea. Or maybe you’ve noticed the increased complexity of Captchas that need you to click on specific image squares before proceeding, often pictures of traffic lights or vehicles. I encountered one that asked me to “please click on the image containing the largest animal in the world” and had to Google the size of a red panda. There’s nothing like failing an “I am not a robot” test to give you a major identity crisis. (Red pandas are smaller than you might think, as it turns out.)
It seems the true definition of innovation is prioritising “new” over “functional”. Like unleashing beta models on the world before testing them fully, or like chatbots that send you around in circles until you get angry and end up apologising to them. There are companies that opt for smooth, sleek designs over practicality, like the Tesla I tried to get into the other day that didn’t seem to have a door handle. The driver politely got out to show me it was hidden above the rear passenger window, which stopped me from groping chaotically all over his car. When “innovative” is deemed better than “logical”, door handles are no longer something you can safely assume you understand. Don’t get too cocky, this is the modern world.
I sometimes feel older than my millennial peers because I find these challenges more stressful than some of them do. But it’s less of an “old man yells at cloud” and more of an “old woman deliriously laughs at cloud”.
Truthfully, I hope these things keep happening. Maybe it’s the only way for bugs to get fixed, or for us to realise that “new” isn’t synonymous with better. I dream of a startup CEO having to engage with a chatbot because he forgot the entry code to his doorless yurt and realising a lot of his inventions are kind of … unnecessary. And really, really silly. If all else fails and we have to surrender to Robot Police, we’ll at least have something to laugh about as their laser eyes shoot us for loitering.
In the end, I managed to get my gas bill sorted without having to stand outside holding a copy of today’s newspaper like a hostage from 1993. The staff member agreed instead to upload a blank screenshot to please the system’s needs so that, technically, a photo was on file. Now that’s innovation!
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Deirdre Fidge is a writer and social worker who has written for ABC’s Get Krack!n, The Weekly with Charlie Pickering, and the BBC. Her work has appeared in ABC News, SBS, the Sydney Morning Herald and Frankie magazine, among others
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