Welcome to the Upgrade Apocalypse
The End is 37% nigh. 13 hrs 47.21 minutes to go.
So I made the mistake of upgrading my phone. It was probably due. I think it was five or six or maybe ten years since the last upgrade. I don't need much from my phone. Anyway, one of the kids went to the phone store to trade in his phone, because it had seen some hard times and really needed to be replaced, and they gave him a great deal.
Then, they were looking at the account - did I mention that we have a family account? No? I probably should have. We're all together on there. - and noticed that everybody was due for an upgrade. So they offered us all the same deal __IF__ we went for it right away. Because the hard sell is never a red flag and anyway, you should upgrade your phone at every opportunity, especially if they offer you a good deal even if the phone was just fine.
This is the world of modern electronic devices. And selling. And money.
By the way, I promise you that this is not just another "All tech is broken" kind of rant. Sure, I do those. But I'm actually going somewhere with this one, so hang in there. I'd promise you a cookie as a reward but this is all computer stuff and you don't need any more of those computer cookies! They're pretty much like cow cookies only harder to get rid of.
But, as the saying goes, I digress. Or even trigress, because I'm so good at it.
If you didn't understand that joke, don't worry about it. You're probably just tired. Anyway, it was kind of lame.
So we took the upgrades. He picked up ours and dropped them off the next morning. I got out of bed to find a bag on the kitchen table with a couple brand new cell phones inside. One of them had a postie thingy on it with my number, so I figured it must be mine. I'm smart that way. So I decided to set it up.
It didn't go well. The phone told me it couldn't activate because I probably didn't have enough bars or something. Pretty soon, there I was, walking around the house, holding the phone this way and that and cursing myself for having left my glasses in the kitchen. Because I couldn't tell how many bars there were without them, you see (and I didn't!).
Then, because this has been a chilly and damp excuse for Spring, I put my coat on and started walking around the yar - Nope. I went back inside and got my glasses. THEN I went back outside and started walking around the yard trying to see if I could get a few bars.
Here's the funny part. Even without being activated, the phone still connected to the WiFi. Or is that WhyFhy? Would you believe WaiFy? Never mind. After the ninth try to activate it failed, I decided to transfer apps and set up some things. I use an authentication app for my job. I use it about 85 times a day, because security is much more important than my time. Getting that app working correctly was very important to me. The instructions just said to back it up to "the cloud" from the old phone and then restore it to the new phone and all would be well.
Surprise! There was no capability to restore from the cloud! It just wasn't possible. I tried several times. So, since it was important, I spent a couple hours setting it up manually. Because security is more important than my time.
This rant is running on a bit, isn't it? Okay. I'll skip a few verses and jump to the end. We had to call customer support and let them fight with it for an hour to get my wife's and my phones all set up and ready to make phone calls. Which I almost never do but it's nice to have the capability in case I ever need to call Help Desk to update my security settings or something.
How long have cell phones been around? I mean, in everybody's hands as opposed to just rich people's's. 20 years? 30? And the companies that make them push yearly upgrades as a sort of life style imperative. You'd think they'd want to be good at those upgrades, wouldn't you? They probably do _want_ to be good at them. They just aren't. Sometimes everything goes smoothly. Sometimes it doesn't. And there's no simple answer when it doesn't.
Now I want you to think forward a bit, about the near future when we have robot doctors, robots cleaning our houses, and cars that drive themselves with the most advanced AI this side of _The Terminator_. Sorry but that reference is mandatory when talking about AI. I don't know why, it just is.
Moving on, it's the future, sometime like the year 2040. Hopefully not 2030 or 2026 but you can pick any year you want, really. You've just received a notice from your insurance company that there's a mandatory upgrade for your car. It's for your safety of course. Because safety, like security, is more important than your time.
So you give the instructions. Maybe you just say it, "I accept the upgrade." And then your car drives away (taking your favorite bowling ball with it because you forgot it was in the trunk and the automatic inventory subsystem didn't like the color) and the new improved one - never shows up because there was a glitch in the upgrade process.
After a frustrating few hours on the phone with support, they tell you your car is stuck on the Autobahn and you're going to have to fly to Germany to manually enter the activation code. It's 84 digits long, case sensitive and includes 3 emojis.
This is actually an improvement from the last time when the activation stopped while you were on your way to Dubuque for cousin Hans's third wedding. Luckily, the (robot) police officer who responded to the presence of a high tech brick in the middle of the road had seen this many times before and knew what to do. You still got a ticket for, "Failure to Upgrade in a Timely Manner" but at least you made it to the wedding reception in time for the Chicken Dance.
I said I was going somewhere with this. I didn't say it was somewhere nice.
Listen, I'm not saying we should never upgrade anything or that the price of technology is too high or some such thing. I love tech. It makes me an okay(ish) living. I just wonder if maybe we aren't paying enough attention to the friction of tech that works great, except for when it doesn't work at all.
All I know for sure is that I'm not going to be in a hurry to upgrade anything for a while.
I don't have a prompt to share this time. I just told ChatGPT what this article was about and told it to make something appropriate. It's a little brown but seems to get the gist.
Lest you forget that I write more (and sillier) stuff than just Technoscreed:
From the author of the Mauser and Keeg Adventures, Tree of Bones and Shadow of a Dream comes All Our Magic Dark and Strange, a collection of fantasy short stories all set in the same dark and strange world.
