We Don’t Need an App for Everything!!

I don’t know about you but I’m finding things are so much more of a faff than they need to be…

Call me Victor Meldrew but with all this technology we have around, things should be much simpler, it’s like we’re using all this new tech for the sake of using it!

For example, if you go to a restaurant and you want to order some food, you scan a QR code to see the menu… why? We had a system, a physical menu that you looked at and chose your dinner, not now though, now you have to scan the pixely square, scroll through the user unfriendly database to decide what you want to gobble up…

Some you can order through, again, WHY!? We had a human for that, maybe that human needed that sort of job, maybe they were earning some money while studying for something more complicated in life… however, now we have to do it through a screen.

What if you don’t have signal? “That’s OK sir, we have free Wi-Fi….” Ah great, so you can mine my data and send me s**t I don’t want? Thanks for that!

I guess it’s all a way of trying to move away from the physical menu’s so you can save a tree or two, thing is, they still have to print the physical menu’s for bozos like me who turns up with his drug dealer phone with no way of scanning a QR code!

So, an utterly pointless venture! I guess they spent millions developing the app too…. As if the hospitality industry isn’t struggling enough, sack the execs I say!!!

Then there’s building sites, one that is very close to home… Back in the day you used to go to site for a brief site induction about the hazards and things you needed to be aware of on that site… It was a tad annoying, but it worked, we all sat around, while the Site Manager told us not to use 240v, get a step ladder permit… yes, you read that correctly, a permit to use a step ladder…. And where assembly points and first aid kits are…

However now we get a link, a link to a video… a video that is generalised to that company and their ongoing scopes of work… So that could be a residential build, a commercial or healthcare build or building a road. And they need to cover everything from literally the ground up!

So we have to sit there through an hour and sometimes more, of video explaining why it’s important to have a banksman when reversing your dumper truck and why when excavating you have to ensure you have the right supports so the sides don’t cave in.

Yes, all valuable information for a bunch of blokes visiting a near completed site to fit a reception desk into a (hopefully) water tight building!

I know what you’re thinking… just skip through it… We would, but it won’t let you!

You can’t just do something else until the bit that relates to you starts either, because there’s a test at the end!

Yep, a full-on test, one you have achieve a certain percentage to be allowed on site, however, by this point you don’t even want to go on site!! It’s too much faff!

And who’s time is it saving?? One persons! One person’s time for about 30 minutes a day. Instead, it’s wasting the time of hundreds of peoples for over an hour at a time!

Then to top it off, you get to site and they have to deliver a site specific induction anyway!!! You can’t make it up!

And guess what, everyone charges for it, so next time you ask why that school cost so much to build, you know why!!

Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of technology, I love a gadget! But I feel we’ve gone too far with some things now, signing in has become something of a mission.

We've even got facial recognition to drop my daughter off at nursery. Fair enough, security is definitely important. But then they've conveniently built a wall that looks like it could double as a hop up for anyone wanting to climb over the fence!

You couldn't make it up!

It’s also become too easy to communicate now, remember when you were at school and you got a letter to take home to your parents? Maybe one a week? Yeah me too… However now there’s an app!!

An app where the school or Nursery can bombard you 24/7 with information, some of which you don’t need or want to know about, you get so desensitised to it that when the important bit comes along you miss it!

We've made it so easy to communicate that we're now communicating absolutely bloody everything! And when everything is treated as important, nothing stands out as important anymore. I don’t give a s**t about Back in Time week or you Special menu for year 3’s just tell me what time, where and how!

And that’s what really ticks me off! All this tech is supposed to save us time, make our lives easier and allow us to do the things that actually matter. But instead we are spending half our lives downloading apps, creating and trying to remember passwords with at least one upper case character, one lower case character, a number and a special icon that is over 12 digits long… then we have to scan a QR code to watch a training video (that’s in 25 different languages, with the one you want in the middle somewhere) all just to do the things we managed to do just perfectly 10 – 15 years ago!

I feel I must apologise for this rant, but it’s all getting a little too much, the phrase “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” keeps coming to mind.

Technology is here, I better get used to it, but for the love of all things special! Please cool it, we don’t need an app for everything!

Time for a beer to cool off!

Take it Easy

TM

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