I think I'm becoming utterly disillusioned on tech stuff lately. I'm hugely aware of the "you like stuff you grew up with" and "you have less patience for stuff as you age" biases, but even so...

Streaming is shit.
Searching is shit.
Researching is shit.
Shopping is shit.
Troubleshooting is shit.
My phone is shit. Autocorrect, touchscreen keyboards, Bluetooth, AI, Android Auto, Spotify, all shit.

It's not even capitalism or consumerism, I'm just tired of arguing and fighting with things I own.

My phone sometimes hangs hard and reboots when I plug it into my car. It's too many taps to navigate to the single digit number of locations I have saved. I'll be mid-playlist, and Spotify will forget and switch to random songs based on the last one it played. People can't hear me on a whatsapp call even after granting it every permission it asks for. The album I had on last week won't play anymore because licensing.

And at the end of the drive it asks me if the fucking sound quality was okay.

You hand over your entire life story to a website for a shipping quote just for it to tell you the thing's out of stock and the product page is just weasel words. Everything you've ever told any website ever has already been sold to other companies and other countries. The thing you buy never arrives because it's possible for a courier company to operate in Australia without delivering to PO boxes. Amazon mixes legit stock with counterfeits but at least your lucky dip item ships free with Prime.

The call centre's scripts are circular and they flat out lie to you about getting a call back or any sort of update or movement happening. The website says it's gone back to the airport but you drive three hours to a courier's warehouse in western Sydney on a hunch and your parcel is sitting on the shelf in plain sight behind the underpaid girl at the counter. You pay extra to refuel your car because you didn't have time to find an app that tells you prices and the pump plays a video ad at you.

Your oven - a device with one moving part, and which functionally can be either "on" or "off" - stops working because a tiny capacitor exploded on the circuit board buried deep in the control panel and it costs hundreds of dollars to get a visit from an authorised screwdriver turner to replace it. The oven still doesn't work until you collectively figure out you have to set the time on the digital clock first, and you're reminded of this needless complication every time there's a power outage.

Your login session at work lasts exactly 168 hours (24*7) and at 168 hours and one minute, you get two MFA prompts simultaneously. You can't click on Outlook yet because the MFA system "didn't hear from you". After logging on, you join your daily Teams standup anonymously, because you don't have time to dig through dialog boxes that ding at you when you click on them to find the one with the working login button. A password prompt appears for a moment, you start typing, then it disappears again.

That 168-hours-and-a-bit slowly cycles later and later into each passing week, and you fucking dread when it reaches late Friday afternoon, because it means Monday morning will be written off by logging in, rebooting, and patting multiple Microsoft applications on the head, and you're useless to your busy colleagues until you do.

This program with no icon or name is preventing you from restarting. You click Cancel. It restarts anyway.

Also, how likely are you to recommend Teams to a friend?