November 20, 2017

Electronic paper cuts

Last week I talked about the primordial joy of building technology. Today, I’m thinking about the opposite: the mountains of quiet frustrations that come from using technology.

As an experiment, I thought it would be interesting to compile a list of grievances that I have encountered while using technology over the past few days. Here it is:

1. iTunes opens every time I plug in my phone. Or my iPad. I never want to open iTunes.
2. Updating my laptop to High Sierra appears to have broken clamshell mode, meaning I need to have my laptop open at all times unless I want to do a weird rain dance of opening it, disconnecting and reconnecting my monitor, then closing it (which, like all weird rain dances, is not guaranteed to work every time.)
3. I restarted my computer and ssh-agent stopped working for some reason.
4. The “Now Playing” widget on my iPhone’s lock screen has a bug where the timestamp of the audiobook I’m listening to doesn’t update until I hit pause.
5. The “Now Playing” widget on my iPhone’s lock screen has a bug where hitting ‘play’ doesn’t work unless I unlock the phone and do it in the app.
6. When I disconnect my laptop from my external monitor all of the windows scrunch up in the left-hand side for reasons passing understanding.
7. The printer disconnected from WiFi. Again.
8. The number of steps recorded by my Apple Watch is different than the number of steps recorded by my geolocation app.
9. My IDE is being unreasonably slow for no reason whatsoever, a condition solvable only by restarting the app.
10. My desktop email application keeps on showing me email that I’ve archived.
11. Searching for “La La Land” on Rotten Tomatoes returned “Land of the Dead”, “In the Land of Women”, and “Land of the Lost” before it returned “La La Land”.

Is eleven enough? I thought so. It took me two hours to compile eleven grievances. There were probably many more than eleven: little blips in the magic that I’ve just grown inured to over time, shrugging them off in the same way I’ve begrudgingly accepted the lack of consistently hot water in my shower. My reaction to these things is always the same:

1. A white-hot flash of frustration.
2. A quiet sigh.
3. A five-second fix. (Putting in the WiFi password; searching my notes for the right terminal command; quitting and restarting. There is always so much quitting and restarting.)

Some of these things are addressable with time and effort. I could probably spend the extra hour figuring out a configuration for my printer that doesn’t cause it to perpetually disconnect.

Some of these are not. I can’t force Rotten Tomatoes to figure out a search algorithm that makes more sense. Hell, I’m not even qualified to say what makes sense — only what doesn’t. (And decisions in technology often are series of cumulative wins and losses, rather than universal answers.)

Anyway, it’s halfway through November, and I am sledding headlong into that time of year where it becomes necessary to indulge in a little navel-gazing (or, rather, a little more than usual): reviewing the past year and setting goals for the next. And I haven’t begun that tradition in earnest quite yet, but I think I am confident about one thing:

I am increasingly exhausted by the tiny flaws of technology, with things not working quite as well as they should despite potential for perfection. I understand the calculus of imperfection — shipped is better than perfect and all that — but I think I have underestimated the impact it has on me, the way spending five seconds fiddling with my windows throws off my rhythm for the entire day.

So it’s a little early for resolutions, but I think next year I want to invest more in correctness, in making sure all the stuff I do (tools, processes, whatever) works the way I want it to work. There’s a power in having everything just so.

Happy Sunday.

I hope things work exactly as you hope they would.