Marmite and Broomsticks

It’s no secret that I don’t like technology, and technology doesn’t like me. What the hell is ChatGBT? My first ever blog (per the old regime that’s now invisible) was about me being a technophobe, and it’s been downhill ever since.

Take last Tuesday, for example. Hubby locked himself in the bathroom when I went to put Marmite on my toast and found that the jar was empty. My weekly shop wasn’t due for another nine days. Marmite-less toast is one of life’s oxymorons; a straw that breaks the camel’s back; a round peg in a square hole; a red rag to a blue cravat; tonic without gin. 

So, despite having already planned a meticulously manoeuvred morning of collecting, delivering and visiting, carefully choreographed to minimise mileage and perfect punctuality, I shoehorned in a daring detour to Morrisons to buy more Marmite. The revised schedule worked well to start with. Into the carpark on two wheels, rubbishly parked the car, dashed into the store, past the alcohol aisle without even looking, grabbed a large jar of the dark brown nectar, straight to the checkout. And that’s where life unravelled. Queues everywhere. But not at the self-checkouts.

I honestly don’t think I’ve ever got through a self-checkout without having to press the panic button. I either have to be age-checked for the gin purchase, or have a voucher for a newspaper, or an item won’t scan, etc. But today, I had just one thing to buy. What could possibly go wrong? Artificial Intelligence, that’s what. The exchange went something like this:

Do you have your own bags?
No. (I’m only buying one item).
Please use one of our bags at a cost of £89.50.
Let’s start again, shall we?
Do you have your own bags?
YES!
Please place your bags in the bag area.

The only bag I had was my handbag so I placed that in the designated area.

You have placed something other than a bag in the bag area. Please remove it.
Tell you what. Keep the damn Marmite. I’ll have Weetabix for breakfast instead.

Then over the weekend, there was the curious incident of the smoke alarm in the night-time that started beeping at just after 2am. Why do smoke alarms, carbon monoxide detectors and house alarms always go off at just after 2am and never 2pm? Is there something about lack of light that messes with alarm psyches? Because it was beeping and not screeching, I guessed the battery needed changing. Easy enough. Nope. Couldn’t get it off the ceiling. Hammer it is then. That worked, apart from lots of white plastic flying off in different directions. Replaced the battery. Still beeped. Found another battery. That didn’t work either. Hammer it is then. This time to smash up the whole unit so that the only place it now beeps is on the great ceiling in the sky.

Here's another example. While driving to Milton Keynes (well, someone has to) I noticed I had less than ¼ tank of petrol, but the digital indicator said that was enough to do 104 miles. I drove another five miles and glanced at the indicator again. I now had enough petrol for 107 miles. How about that? My little Honda Jazz has reversed climate change. Put that in your smoking pipe, Grater Funbuggerer.

All the above I can handle, however, compared with telephone answering systems. You know what I mean:

Press 1 for sales, 2 for repairs, 3 for complaints, 4for athletic, 5 for gold rings, 6 for accounts, 7 for a secret never to be told, 8 for art’s sake, all for 1 and 1 for all, 2 for repairs, 3 for …..

This was bad enough, but the sadists who dreamt all this up decided to make life even more difficult by inventing the voice-recognition prompt. Here’s how it went recently when I tried to phone HMRC to find out why they’d cashed my cheque for a voluntary National Insurance contribution but not increased the amount of pension I was due:

Welcome to HMRC. If you want to talk to us about X then you can’t because all you need to know is on our website. If you want to talk to us about Y then there’s no point as we haven’t got any more information than we had six months ago. If you want to talk about Z then hang up and call a completely different department that is even more useless than we are. If you want to talk about anything else, tell us in a few words.
National Insurance Contributions.
You want to talk about National Insurance Contributions. Is that right?
Yes.
Are you self-employed?
No.
Do you live abroad?
No.
Why the eff are you calling us then?
I’ve paid a voluntary contribution and it’s gone missing.
You want to pay a voluntary contribution?
Good enuff!
Have you read the latest leaflet?
No.

Five minutes of unintelligible gobbledygook later: 

Would you like that information repeated?
No.
Thank you. Goodbye.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

As I say, I hate technology. I hate flying even more. Combine the two and …

Hubby and I recently flew from Heathrow to Innsbruck. We checked in fine then headed to security. I took off my coat, boots, belt and watch and put them in a large tray, then put my rucksack, laptop, phone and liquid-products in another tray and sent them off to be X-Rayed while I walked through the metal detector. My first tray arrived on the other side. I put back on my coat, boots, belt and watch then gawped in dismay as my second tray was pulled to one side. In the outside pocket of my ruck sack was a full (expensive) flask of water. An officious little tart gave me the choice of allowing her to confiscate the (expensive) flask or I could pour out the water. Do I look that daft? I said I’d pour out the water. 

“We haven’t got the facility for you to dispose of the water here,” she chanted. “You’ll have to remove your coat, boots, belt and watch and take the flask back through security, empty it in the sink provided, rejoin the long queue, put the flask back through X-Ray and walk back through the metal detector.”

Yup. BA’s bag of technology tricks includes a singing-dancing website, algorithms to schedule flights, navigation systems to rival Star Trek’s, software to calculate thrust and flap-settings to optimise getting huge lumps of metal off the ground, plus X-Ray machines and metal detectors, but they don’t have a labour-saving, queue-shortening, stress-relieving sink.

Should've gone on my broomstick.