Rantfile

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  • The word ‘hack’ has lost all meaning

    A “life hack” used to mean something clever. Now it means using a clothes peg to close a bag of crisps, which is not a hack, it is a peg, which was invented for holding things closed, which is what you are doing with it.

    I saw a video titled “kitchen hack” in which a person cut an onion with a knife. That is not a hack. That is cooking. The onion was not exploited. No system was compromised. A vegetable was prepared in the normal way and someone put music over it.

    I would like the word back. I am not optimistic.

  • Terms and conditions, which I have read

    I read them. All of them. For a toaster. It took forty minutes and I now know that the toaster’s manufacturer is not liable if I use the toaster in a bath, that the toaster may collect “usage data”, and that I have agreed to resolve any dispute through arbitration in a city I have never visited.

    It is a toaster. It has one job and a lever. Why does it need to know anything about me? What usage data? “Toast, 3, 07:42”? Who is reading this? Is there a dashboard somewhere with my toast on it?

    I accepted, obviously. I wanted toast. That is the entire business model: put the thing you want behind the thing you will not read.

  • Nobody knows how to merge

    Two lanes become one. This is a solved problem. It has been solved for decades. The solution is called taking turns, which children can do, and which adults in cars apparently cannot.

    There are two kinds of people at a merge. The ones who move over a mile early and then seethe at everyone who did not, and the ones who drive to the very end and then seethe at everyone who will not let them in. Both groups are certain they are correct. Both groups are the reason it takes nine minutes to travel three hundred metres.

    Zip. Like a zip. One from here, one from there. I will let you in. You will let the next one in. We will all arrive at roughly the same time and nobody will have to make eye contact.

  • The weather app that is confidently wrong

    It said sun. I wore the thin jacket. It rained for six hours. When I opened the app, standing under an awning, dripping, it said sun. It was looking at the rain. It had, presumably, instruments. It said sun.

    The next day it said rain and I took the umbrella and carried it, dry, through a day of uninterrupted blue sky, like a man carrying a sword to a picnic.

    I am not asking for certainty. Weather is hard. I am asking for a small amount of humility. “Probably sun. Honestly, could go either way.” I would respect that app. I would give that app notifications.

  • Why does every app want to send me notifications

    I downloaded an app to look at a train timetable. Before it would show me a single train it asked whether it could send me notifications. About what? Trains I am not on? The app does not know where I am going. It has no basis for an opinion.

    I said no. It asked again a week later, with slightly different wording, like a toddler who has learned that “may I” works better than “can I”.

    There are now so many of these that my phone’s settings page is a graveyard of apps I allowed once, in a weak moment, and that now feel entitled to tell me about a sale. I did not sign up for a relationship. I wanted the 8:14.

  • Printers

    That is the whole title. Printers. I do not have to explain. Everyone who has ever owned one is nodding right now, and some of them have a specific printer in mind, and a specific afternoon, and a specific noise.

    Mine insists it is out of cyan. I am printing a black and white document. I understand that the cyan is somehow structural, that the printer cannot conceive of black without the comfort of knowing cyan is nearby, but I would like it to try. Just once. Print the page. Be brave.

    It is also, somehow, offline. It is three feet from the router. It has a light that says it is connected. The computer says it is not. They have never met.

  • The group chat that will not die

    It was created for a weekend in April. The weekend happened. It was, by most accounts, fine. It is now October and the chat is still going, and it has become a place where one person posts a photo of a sunset every evening and another person replies with a thumbs up, and the rest of us are held hostage by notifications.

    I cannot leave. Leaving is a statement. Muting is cowardice. I have muted. I am a coward. Every few days I open it and there are sixty messages about a restaurant none of us will go to.

    Someone should invent a group chat that expires. Like milk. You set the date when you make it and after that it simply curdles and vanishes and nobody has to be the one who left.

  • Recipes that begin with a memoir

    I wanted to know how long to roast the squash. To find out I scrolled past a story about a grandmother, a trip to a market in a country I will not name, a divorce, a dog, and a reflection on the nature of autumn. The dog was fine. The squash was forty minutes at 200.

    I understand why it happens. I do. There are reasons that involve search engines and advertising and the economics of writing recipes for free. I still think a recipe should start with the recipe. Put the memoir underneath. Call it “notes”. People who want the dog will scroll down to the dog.

    Also: “season to taste” is not an instruction, it is a shrug written down.

  • People who stop at the top of the escalator

    The escalator does not stop. That is the defining feature of the escalator. It keeps delivering people to the top at a steady rate, and the top is therefore not a place to stand and consider your options, and yet here you are, standing, considering.

    Behind you a queue is forming that cannot un-form. We are arriving whether you like it or not. We are doing the small shuffling dance of people who do not want to touch a stranger but are being physically pushed into one by a machine.

    Walk three steps. That is all. Three steps forward and then stop as long as you like. Read your phone. Admire the ceiling. Three steps is the difference between a station and a crush.

  • Hold music, and the lie of ‘your call is important’

    If my call were important it would be answered. That is what importance means. Instead my call is held, and while it is held I am played a loop of eleven seconds of a saxophone that someone recorded in 2003 and never, ever listened back to.

    Every ninety seconds a voice interrupts the saxophone to tell me that my call is important, and that I can also visit the website, where, for the record, I started, and where the website told me to call.

    Forty minutes. I made lunch. I ate lunch. I washed up. At forty-one minutes a human answered and I was so startled that I forgot the question. We were both embarrassed. I hung up. I will call again tomorrow, with the question written on a card, like a hostage.