Category: Technology

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.

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.

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.

There is a particular dialog box that I have come to think of as a tiny bureaucrat living in my laptop. It appears when I am mid-sentence. It wants to restart. It offers two choices: Restart Now, which is a lie because nothing is saved, and Remind Me Later, which is also a lie because “later” turns out to mean “in eleven minutes, during the call”.

I have never once wanted the update at the moment it was offered. Not once in my life. I would love an option that says “when I close the lid tonight, do your thing, and if it goes badly, leave a note”. That is how every other service in my life works. The plumber does not interrupt dinner to ask whether now is a good time to replace a washer.

The worst part is the progress bar. It goes to 97 percent in forty seconds and then sits there contemplating its choices for nine minutes while I stare at a logo. Whoever drew that bar knew. They knew and they drew it anyway.