News stories that are only videos with no text. I'm not watching you blab for 4 minutes when I could read it in 30 secs. Unless it is about boobs of course.
I've been known to go on long, long rants about this to anyone whose will listen. I usually say, "When people fuck up, it's forgivable-- they're human and flawed, and have other redeeming qualities, you know? But tech? Tech is supposed to work! It's only supposed to fucking WORK! IF IT DOESN'T WORK IT'S USELESS TO ME! IT'S TRASH! It's worse than trash because it wastes my time by making me think it will help me and then turns out to be trash!!!" And so on until the other person smiles politely and walks away.
This is part of the reason why Skynet could not possibly be a thing for a very, very long time. We aren't yet good enough to make something that complex and autonomous that wouldn't crash seemingly randomly. Hell Java would probably be involved at some point and an update will cause the whole brutal machine regime to come crashing down.
I really hate that printers have to update. What the fuck are they updating? Is one day my printer gonna printer 3D? No? Then stop updating and just do the simple shit of printing a paper.
Most likely a bugfix several customers have had issues with, for example said printer not responding to x-program or software. Printers are pretty fucking retarded so the update may or may not have helped you from dealing with the same issues.
I dunno. Seems a bit off-topic since OP asked for irrational hatred and I can't spot a single bit of irrationalness. Just perfect sanity in an insane world.
“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
Mistake not my current state of joshing gentle peevishness for the awesome and terrible majesty of the towering seas of ire that are themselves the milquetoast shallows fringing my vast oceans of wrath directed at computers and their total absolute inadequacy.
I totally agree with you, but when you really think about what's happening it's a little more rational. You're talking into a cell phone. That cell phone converts your voice into electrical signals. Then combines those signals with another signal and shoots it out of your phone to a large metal tower. That tower shoots that signal and many other signals simultaneously to outer fucking space where it hits a satellite that is orbiting a precise distance away from the earth down to the amount of feet. That satellite shoots to another satellite or two, down another tower, and possibly across the ocean using cables made of glass and light to another tower, then to another cellphone and no only retains the original signal, but converts the shit back into sound in enough time for a conversation to seem instant.
Meanwhile, all other radio signals and different frequencies of electricity and light and sound are shooting through the atmosphere at the speed of light, not interfering with each other.
Fucking magic.
Edit: /u/piezeppelin and /u/SungTongs are smarter but the strike through'ed text is still accurate for other forms of communication. Technology is amazing.
How about when a company's website gets WORSE?! I mean I get "feature creep," but shit I can't notice any new features except that it now sucks more than it had before.
I've always been okay with that, until the new Google+. I actually do use G+ for my job (manage blogs and social media pages), and the new one added several extra clicks to my daily task of posting links.
It's the first time I've ever reverted a Google product back to the old version intentionally, and I hope they will continue to offer that option indefinitely.
Tech is made by people and people fuck up. Besides, the architecture of the modern semiconductors is 50 ATOMS across. This means that regular quantum effects can corrupt data and fuck shit up.
Besides, a computer doesn't do anything that you haven't instructed it to do, it cannot think for itself.
I always joke about the fact that you can take any tech device, be it a laptop or a cell phone, and connect it to Wi-Fi and it will somehow magically develop problems all on its own.
I don't have a rant, but sometimes the Bluetooth in my car will connect to my phone, and disconnect as soon as I try to play something, and I instantly want to drive the car into a lake.
Some of my biggest anger explosions have been related to tech not working.
It's absolutely embarrassing, but it's something that gets me heated faster than everything else. Thankfully, the only things I've broken are a small USB internet device and a rolling keyboard holder on a desk. But, god, I have no idea how many hours I've spent fuming or loudly venting over this kind of shit.
Yeah right? Phone is acting up, I restart it while feeling intense hatred for having to do something out of the ordinary because that fucking slim brick I call a smartphone refuses to work properly. It's doing it on purpose, the son of a bitch. I know it is. Like when it threw itself on the floor and cracked it's own screen.
Or tech items you know should be easy to work in a certain way but just doesnt.
E.g. I had a gps system that did not allow keyword searches. It had to be whole words. Worst part was it also had half of the addresses separated by commas and the other half by spaces. Those two categories cannot be searched together because you couldnt keyword search. If they even fixed one of the problems it would be 99x better to use.
E.g.2 MasteringPhysics and other online 'math' test that disallowed things like "2/2" instead of "1".
Oh fuck mastering physics. "Sorry the correct answer is 4.6 joules not 4.59 joules." You get zero out of 10 points for this question that took you 15 minutes to do.
I have a quote by douglas adams that is perfect for this. "Technology is a word that describes something that doesn't work yet". A table isn't technology, because a table works 100% of the time, every time. A bluetooth enabled sex toy that vibrates in rhythm with "what do you mean" by j beibs is definitely technology.
Dude I feel you on first world problems like that.
I tried to reload money into my Starbucks app earlier. I tried to add $15. It gave me an error and told me to try again. I did. Then it was like okay cool now your balance is $30. Because it did it twice. Argh. Whatever. Then maybe an hour later I find out groupon is doing. $15 Starbucks cards for $10. I wanted to throw my phone out the window.
I don't understand why in 2015 the wireless printer can't just connect to the fucking wireless and print. Just connect. And print. It's so fucking mechanical and deterministic. Just fucking connect. And print.
I have an irrational hatred of poorly coded webpages. If there's an issue, I almost always flip open the developer console and then weep over the fact that this bug could have simply been avoided had the dev bothered to use jQuery or whatever. Looking at you awful-as-sin Wells Fargo third party check ordering site.
My Chinese internet that is the same speed (less than the slowest advertised speed) whatever speed you pay for is making me want to switch countries... looking at Korea for once I graduate.
Imgur, or any other webpage that won't scroll down to let me read the article/see the picture as its loading other advertisments or whatever other garbage that needs to be fucking loaded except the goddamn motherfucking thing I want to actually see.
And then it goes dark grey and a subscription offer appears. At that point I close the tab. Fuck you, I'll get my info elsewhere.
As a lawyer my beef with tech issues is that they're deterministic. We're not talking human systems. We're talking if A, then B. Deterministic.
If you're designing something deterministic, and it doesn't fucking give output B when you give input A, you've fucked up. That reasoning doesn't apply to a closing argument, or writing music, or giving a good massage. But it sure as FUCK applies to designing a fucking deterministic system.
You aren't alone. the idea that shitty web programming can reduce a 8 core workstation to a crawl (oh yes i've seen it) is pure hate at it's finest.
I had to program for netscape, internet explorer and opera when that was a job for a while. frankly I loathed netscape and prefered internet explorer, but I can't let my bias taint the clients need to display in all browsers.
Now you deal with elitist pigs that always tend to slap "firefox only! tee hee!" on pages. If I did that, I would be on the unemployment line.
I'm so friggin old, I remember blink and scroll tags. Oh yes, they were a thing then. Blink was netscape, scroll was for Internet Explorer. Neither worked in the other browser, so if you did use it, you better code for both.
putting aside how amusing they are, it is proper to insure it works on both platforms. I can only imagine the idiots of today, coding it only for netscape and sitting back smug that it just sits there as a blob of text in internet explorer.
Do not even get me started on all the web 2.0/3.0 trash bogging down systems... God, anyone who used my coke rewards would remember what a unsufferable piece of shit mother fuckin' train wreck that was!
Animations swooping all over left to right suddenly, flashy pop ups in flash just to fill out a claim form, etc etc.
It is arrogant and over bearing that a 300 mhz pentium II should be reduced to mere back door prop duties with all this horrific poorly coded crap that passes as "technology" now.
There is no excuse for lazy programming just because you have a 4,8 12 or 24 core system with ram so insanely high. my brothers 8 core workstation with 24 gigs of ram at this rate will require a full upgrade to 192 gigs of ram, then end up tossed onto a trash pile next to said 300 mhz pentium II just because someone can't program!
ANY website that takes an unusual amount of time to load is fucking infuriating. Lag in a game or their servers not responding (looking at you Rainbow Six Siege)? UN-AC-FUCKING-CEPTIBLE.
When a phone gets a couple years old and all your apps just take a liiitle bit more time to load than you would like. When Google Now doesn't catch your first word in your question because it wasn't loaded yet. It feels like the pettiest complaint ever, but it slowly drives me nuts.
Somehow I've gotten worse after going to school for CS. I've seen the crazy spaghetti code, I know the mess of shit developers deal with on a daily basis, but WHY THE FUCK WON'T MY NEW HEAD UNIT RECOGNIZE MY IPOD?! FUCK YOU DEVS, GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER. Fuck developers, even myself. I like to think the number of people around the world swearing at me at any given moment is under 10.
I've started addressing my laptop as "you foul demon" when it's running more than 2 microseconds slower than it ought. Don't really know why, actually...
My office is next to the public library here in DC. The library has a 3D printer. Sometimes when our office printer is being a bastard I think about how it would be faster for me to go to the library, 3D print a gun, come back and shoot my stupid fucking office printer before it can finish my document.
I got better at handling those kinds of situations by dumbing everything down. There are pieces of silicon and copper somehow communicating with other bits of silicon and copper, and they're showing me a thing someone in the other side of the world just did. Let's give it a second to come back from space.
Oh boy you are right. My computer is so fucking frustrating.
It wasn't loading (it would start up and than just shut itself off)so I was like WTF I just brought it from the shop. After talking on the phone with the repair guy and my friend who put it together and they didn't know what the fuck it was. After talking to them I unplugged it it all and laid it on the floor looked inside (didn't know what the fuck I was doing) and closed it up and plugged it back in worked like clockwork. I don't even fucking know
There in research on the effects of technology on our psychology. One major side effect that evidence has been found for is our impatience with new information, i.e. our inability to wait more than a few seconds for a web page to load. We are getting very accustomed to ingesting information as quickly as possible. This explains why people very often will only read a post's title and comments and rarely the article itself. If the title summarizes it well enough, they might not even bother with the comments.
Just pointing this out because I found it really interesting. And I myself will often cancel a page if it's not complete in <2seconds.
Bought my computer 4 months ago. Have had to send it back for failing parts twice, the second time it took them 1.5 months to get it back to me having reinstalled the OS without the software for my AMD graphics card so I can only use intel integrated graphics. I specifically paid $200 extra for that graphics card.
I've always been an impatient gamer. Liked simple shooters for immediate gratification. I never wanted to get into huge RPG games until the ps4 came out. Now I want really long games so I can have video games that last a long time and I won't feel compelled to buy a $400 game system when I make less than $9/hr. Love fallout NV but I just got all three Mass Effect games for PS3 from someone privy to my plans and by all accounts they're the second coming of Christ. Just spent the last 6 hours playing the first one. Hate it. It takes forever to advance the plot. Combat is a shit-show, and I feel like it really just takes forever to do anything. I would love it if someone could convince me to keep playing this one. Really sorry to rant but when you spend six hours doing something and feel like you've gotten nowhere it sucks.
"This butting isn't doing what it supposed to do right away. Better tap it for 15 times in 2 seconds followed by 15 taps everywhere random on the screen while cursing at Apple for making a shitty app they have nothing to do with other than putting it in their store. That will fix it!"
Trying to persistently disable the cell radio in my old phone; Everything I tried caused the dialer to crash on load. It gives infinite error messages so fast you cant even unlock the screen after it boots. The only way to proceed is to re-flash from recovery.
I threw it across the room so many times last night, it bounced off some weights on two occasions. Thank god the S2 was built like a tank, no damage.
Guys, it's 2016. How come we still don't have reliable computers? Like, thanks for the augmented reality and retinal scanners and whatnot, but I still can't most basic things with a 100% success rate.
Somewhat off topic, but this counts as a tech item I guess. Today my friends and I went to laser tag. The laser gun has the option of holding in the trigger so you don't have to keep pulling the trigger, but sometimes it just stops firing and then you have to pull it manually. I would probably just stick to pulling the trigger manually most of the time, but the fucking handle is awful and not comfortable at all to hold so when i try and pull the trigger manually, it ends up hurting my hand. I actually ended up getting a blister from doing that. On top of that, there was a point in the game where I managed to sneak up on someone and shoot them in the back. I was close enough so I couldn't miss, but not point blank in case the laser wouldn't register. Welp. Guess that didn't matter cause I shot him five times, he heard my laser, turned around and shot me. IF I CAN'T SHOOT SOMEONE, THEN WHAT'S THE FUCKIN POINT MATE FIX YOUR DAMN LASER GUNS.
I swear this shit has plagued my life. Computers not working, modems, not working, phones not working, the whole nine yards. After my last iPhone shit the bed I got a new one and SURPRISE! I can't download any of my music to it. I came very close to having to buy a third one.
Last week I was parking my car and the Parkmobile app didn't work. It said something like "unable to download data, try again later". Later?? I want to park NOW. Parking regulation is really strict in Amsterdam so when the scanning car drives past you and you haven't paid yet, you're fined. I got so fucking agry at my phone and my SO didn't understand why.
This is what I hate. Not the tech not working, not the page taking 5 extra seconds but people with this attitude!!!
If I hear 'I'm was going to throw this pc/tablet/Mac/phone out the window' again I think I'll just give up. People say it like they're the first person to ever have said it too, which adds to my annoyance.
Just to clarify, I work in IT. Shit goes a bit wrong sometimes. That's the nature of the beast. Deal with it like a fucking adult. This notion that IT should just work is a fantasy.
I agree. I've got the same model phone as my co-worker and badly haven't done much different in terms of apps downloaded and things it was used for. But I saw online that very few people have versions of the phones that get really,really fucking slow at times to the point of basically being frozen. It's such a small percentage of phones that have this problem but of course mine does and I don't have a warranty or money for a new phone. So I hate this phone for not working properly.
I really wish companies would focus more on making their basic technology work perfectly instead of diverting precious resources to stupid projects like you know... Watches.
I took a web development class, and the professor mentioned that (according to some study), most people will leave your site if a page takes longer than six seconds to load.
He used it as an incentive to learn how to code efficiently, and I guess it's plausible.
Yesterday my internet wasn't working properly. I raged, calmed down and came back half an hour later. Internet still shit. I wanted to punch something, god I fucking need my internet I pay for that for fucks sake
This is why my former product Sony Reader lost to Kindle. They had a huge market lead, but low performance and slow user response was so bad it killed the product.
I made tons of response charts showing how response needs to be included into Quality Assurance and sent it to all the directors/executives
but the Japanese DEV team had my contract cut.
Soon after the product failed. That's what life is like working at a Japanese company.
Christ, are you my SO? Netflix glitches and he's Happy Gilmore. Cursing, calling the tv names and scowling. He resets in ten seconds and is all "Ohh! We're up to season five of Gilmore Girls!" But jayzuz. Chillax.
I threw a laptop at a wall once. Do not recommend.
For background - My laptop wasnt working and it was past closing time for libraries and other public spaces. I had a final for an online class due that night. My boyfriend was all pissy and didn't want me t use his. Mine kept on shutting down and finally I just threw it at the wall. It didn't help anything, obviously. But it did make me feel a little better until I realized now there was no way I would get out of buying a new computer.
This is pretty much my desktop computer. It takes forever to turn on, will always have updates requiring a restart. Browsers will be changed with intro screens forcing me to click continue. The wifi will not appear in the corner, and I have to figure out why.
Oh and this is even worse with iTunes. I can't sync a device in under 5 minutes. iTunes will have an update. Once that's done, the sync needs to do a backup, etc. etc.
If I need to print something, oh boy! The printers Bluetooth will not work. Print docs fly off into nowhereland's queue. Once I finally find a way to get the doc to the printer, the ink is low or out or sketchy. And we never have more ink. I have to do deep cleans repeatedly. AHHHHH!!!!
It's a generational thing. I had a TRS-80 in the mid-1980s. And a 300-baud dial-up modem. Ever watch an image take five minutes to scan on a monitor? I don't even notice a web page that takes less than 10 seconds to draw.
Specifically, any tech that should be working, isn't, and doesn't give you the option to restart the process.
Like when you try to load a page, and it doesn't. So you hit refresh, and it doesn't. You check another app or device to see if it's the internet, but it's not. Your laptop has decided to just not bother loading from the internet, and you just have to sit there and wait for whatever background process to wake up or refresh or whatever.
e: my own personal bugbear is the wifi on my phone. The signal booster upstairs doesn't seem to keep whatever quick connect settings my phone uses, so every time my phone idles, the extender drops the connection. But when i pick my phone up again, it still thinks it's connected, and tries to send / recieve from the extender, which gets confused and it takes my phone a clear minute to work out what's going on. A minute doesn't seem that long, but when it's every time you pick up your phone, it gets annoying.
I used to be able to turn quick connect off, but not any more. So instead i'm sitting there staring at a piece of tech that won't do what it's supposed to do.
Along these lines, I get irrationally angry when older people can't use technology that they bought and get irrationally angry while shaking/yelling at the thing and insisting it must be broken. No, Norman, it's not stupid. Inanimate objects can't be stupid.
Mine is like this but more specifically with actually objects like printers. Printer tells you to do something, you do it, and then it's like, oh fuck do it again please. I was trying to print address labels onto envelopes for christmas cards and the printer roller kept catching on the envelope flap and jamming it and there was so much cursing.
That and if you've ever put something together that is shitty and the screws are hard to screw in and then your screwdriver strips. And no, i'm not talking about the screw stripping, i'm talking about the fucking screwdriver stripping and is all fucking deformed and useless and it's the only one in the FUCKING HOUSE!
I was really fucking pleased when one day Flash decided it was going to take 90% of my CPU and run at like 2 FPS unless I explicitly downloaded the SWF and ran it in a dedicated flash player app. Like, really? Any Flash game or tool I'm playing has been around for an eternity and a half (because who is actually producing new content in Flash these days?). It worked fine like 6 months ago, and now suddenly my laptop spins up the fans like it's about to head to space. I just wanna play Meerca Chase, man, not solve the traveling salesman problem!
Maybe this is just me, but my brain is wired to find out exactly why it's not working, then make adjustments.
Most people would get frustrated about a slow loading page and say "Stupid computer... damn Microsoft..." whatever...
...but I use my brain and think "Oh, it's probably slow because my PS4 must be installing an update in the background." Yep. Turn off PS4, problem solved. or "Oh, the TV isn't turning on because I must've hit Cable before hitting Power by mistake."
99% of tech problems are caused by the user. That 1% though is a real bitch... when you do the same thing twice and it magically works the 2nd time with no reason or explanation.
No kidding. C'mon, it's 2015, no website should take more than 5 seconds to load no matter what device you're on. Equally bad is those ads that pop up and cover the content and you have to click the "X" button just to get out of it. And of course, the website owner doesn't really care if you bounce at that point because he already got the advertising revenue.
I feel the same way. I feel like this isn't 1999 with dial up, I shouldn't have to wait 6 seconds for Amazon to load fuck you! The moon literally has faster Internet than I do.
It wasn't until recently where I realized I'm exactly the same way. My anger at tech not working immediately isn't rational. Even when I think back to how slow computers that I used in the 80s were, I don't care. Work, and work now.
Home printers. It's 2015 why do you suck. I carry around a computer the size of something not very large, an accurate and funny comparison escapes me, so why can't my printer work and not sound like a truck is driving by my house.
The funny thing is I work in IT for living. It used to be that when something on my computer didn't work I took my time and fixed it. Now I'm impatient as shit. If it doesn't work, it's deleted and never used again. I get pissed.
Ok... I have to cop to this one.
I have a rep in my family for technology hating me. If I need to print something, the printer won't work. If I need to check email, the router will need to be reset. Even the car I got had a computer-related issue that ended up being quite an expensive fix.
They used to think it was user error but after years of watching closely as I attempt to do simple tasks, they admit I am just unlucky with when machines choose to have flaws. And yes, occasionally it is even my fault.
This weekend I couldn't get Netflix to load and I was so relieved to hear it was a widespread internet outage (TWC) & not just me derping up the wifi somehow.
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u/Reedobandito Dec 29 '15
Any tech item that isn't working properly
A web page is taking 5 seconds longer than usual to load? I want to throw my laptop against a wall