*** begin quote ***
“There’s an App for That”
Remember when you could just do things?
Check into a hotel. Board an airplane. Park your car. Order lunch. Buy a ticket. Enter a museum. Pay a bill. Turn on the television. Apparently those days are over.
Now there’s an app for that.
Checking in for a flight on an obscure foreign airline you will almost certainly never fly again? Download the app.
Parking for 37 minutes in a small town in Virginia? Download the app.
Want to look at the menu? Scan the QR code. Actually, no, download the app.
Want to pay for the parking meter? App.
Charge the car? Different app.
Open the hotel room? App.
Use the hotel Wi-Fi? Create an account, verify your email, accept 46 pages of terms and conditions, then download the app.
And naturally, every app would like to get to know you better.
Please provide your full legal name, date of birth, home address, email address, mobile number, two forms of identification, emergency contact, name and phone number of your closest living relative, credit card, billing address, location permissions, Bluetooth access, camera access, microphone access, contacts, notifications, and apparently a small vial of blood.
Then create a password containing 14 characters, one capital letter, two numbers, a hieroglyph, a Sanskrit character, and the name of your third-grade teacher.
Excellent.
Now verify your identity with a six-digit code we have sent to the phone you are currently using to read the six-digit code.
Whoops! The password has expired, create a new password. Be sure it doesn’t contain anything related to the last password. Oh, now verify your identity again.
All because you wanted to park the car.
There may indeed be an app for everything.
Unfortunately, there does not yet appear to be an app for leaving me the hell alone.
*** end quote ***
Laugh!
Yes, IKTF (I Know The Feeling).
Shouldn’t there be a genre of single function apps that can satisfy these “marketers” and yet not drive us all nut and fill up our “phones”.
It seems a misnomer to call what we carry around today as a “phone”? I miss my Mickey Mouse handset that I had until my Mom came to visits eons ago and asked for it. How could I say “NO”? Good thing it had a switch for touch tone or not. She never got touch tone because she didn’t want to pay for it. I laugh even when I think about it because she kept it and her other extension phone switched to pulse even after the country switched to touch tone from pause for free. When I’d use her phone I’d have to wait while the pulses were sent … … click … Click click … Click <eight more times> … Click <nine more times>… <<You get the idea?>> All to “dial” 1-90 something. Felt like an eternity.
Laugh!
And I am called “cynical” and “curmudgeon”? At least I am not a “LUDDITE”!
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Posted by reinkefj 
Reinke Faces Life 
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