False Creek Geek: Technology that Fails Us

My latest column for The Yaletown View. I’m wasn’t particularly happy with this one. It reflects that it was written in haste during the stress of the Christmas season.

We humans have come a long way. Just a few hundred years ago, we lived short, violent lives of manual labour and ignorance. We’re still pretty ignorant, but we’ve made a lot of progress in improving our quality of life. We’ve got the Lexus where we only had the horse, medical science where we had leaches, telephones where we had, well, shouting.

Yet, much of today’s technology lets us down. It doesn’t work the way it was intended to, and there’s no salvation in sight. Here are three products we use every day that consistently don’t work well enough:

Change Machines

Since I was old enough to ask for money, I’ve played arcade games. Arcade games require change. So, I’d have to convert the $5 dollar bill my Dad gave me into quarters. This always required more patience than I had. It involved standing in supplication before the change machine altar and begging it to convert my bill into coins. Who hasn’t spent ten minutes smoothing out their money and feeding it—gingerly, with both hands—into the machine’s mouth? Nine times out of ten, it spits the bill back out at you. It’s the 21st century…isn’t it time we were able to reliably make change?

Cellular Phones

Many people—the fools—think cellular phones are a gift from the gods. They are a wonderful invention, and now that most people can afford one, they have transformed our lives. However, it still seems like one in three calls goes like this:

ME: Hello?
CALLER: Hello?
ME: Who’s this?
CALLER: Can you hear me?
ME: Who is calling, please?
CALLER: No, I bought some pants.
ME: What?
CALLER: Can you hear me now?

And so on. When will we have a reliable cellular network that doesn’t drop calls or sound like people are phoning from the far side of the Moon?

Computers

It amazes me that normal humans, as opposed to geeks like myself, use computers on a daily basis. They’re moody, delicate creatures, prone to failure at the slightest misstep. They seem to break, or at least act petulant, more often than they work, and they require a sullen expert from the IT department to fix them. Each of us develops work-arounds to avoid our computer’s foibles—‘just ignore those big red X’s, that happens all the time’—but shouldn’t they be a little more reliable?

I was describing these disappointing technologies to a Japanese friend of mine. She pointed out that most of these effortlessly work all the time in Japan. So maybe our tech shortcomings are cultural?

Regardless, it’s time that we stopped inventing things and started perfecting the things we’ve already invented.