Rantfile

Blog

  • A brief defence of the afternoon nap

    This is not a rant. I was told this blog should occasionally not be a rant. So: the nap.

    Twenty minutes. After lunch. In a chair, not a bed, because a bed is a commitment and a chair is a suggestion. You wake up slightly confused about what year it is, and then the second half of the day arrives as a fresh day, which you were not expecting, like finding money in a coat.

    Everyone who tells you naps are lazy is tired. Look at them. They are tired. They would be better after twenty minutes in a chair. We all would. Normal service resumes next week; the dishwasher has done something unforgivable.

  • I have thoughts about shopping trolleys

    One wheel. There is always one wheel. The other three are fine, professional, committed to the job, and the fourth is on a journey of its own, dragging the whole trolley gently to the left like a dog that has seen another dog.

    I have started testing them in the trolley park. I push them a metre. I listen. I look like a man choosing a horse. People stare. I do not care. I will not spend forty minutes correcting course in the cereal aisle.

    Also the coin thing. I do not carry coins. Nobody carries coins. The trolley is held hostage by a currency that no longer exists.

  • Please stop putting QR codes on menus

    I came to eat. I did not come to scan. I do not want to download your app, create an account, confirm my email and agree to marketing to find out whether you have soup.

    The menu was a piece of paper. It worked for a thousand years. It did not need a battery. It did not require me to hold my phone at a specific angle under a light that is, by design, dim and romantic.

    And when the website loads, it is a PDF. A PDF of a menu. So you had the menu. You had the exact thing. You printed it into a document and then refused to print the document.

  • Airports are designed by people who hate you

    You walk two kilometres to the gate. The gate changes. You walk back. On the way back you pass a shop selling a pillow for ninety pounds, a sandwich for fourteen, and a bottle of water that costs more than the water you were made to throw away at security because it was a liquid, which it still is.

    The seats at the gate are bolted together with armrests so that nobody can lie down, because lying down in an airport is apparently a moral failing. There are four plug sockets for three hundred people and two of them are broken and one is being used by a man charging a drone.

    And then they board by group, and you are group nine, and group nine is boarded last, after the plane has already filled every overhead locker, so your bag goes in the hold, and you will see it again in a different country, if at all.

  • 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.