Tech wreck

Modern technology is meant to improve our lives, but for one exasperated 63-year-old, the latest gadgets and gizmos are becoming increasingly infuriating.

Image credit: Getty Images

By David Stephenson | Published - 2 May 2025

Never change anything. Well, not willingly. Having recently found myself with more time on my hands, I’ve been trying to get my affairs in order – only to find myself having one tech meltdown after another.

Emails and other random accounts are not working all over the place – and I’ve been left with what they call "bots" to console me. These robot communicators are absolutely useless, albeit efficiently polite. Try swearing at Alexa; she always takes it well.

I’ve been so out of sorts that my family has told me to join a golf club. But you don’t want me on the first tee – my stress levels are higher than the PM’s heart rate on a call to Trump.

Even as I started writing this piece, Microsoft informed me that I needed to enter "safe mode". Am I actually a danger to myself? If Microsoft creator Bill Gates walked into the room now, I would definitely have words with him. I’d want to know why tech, meant to improve our world, has become so infuriating.

I wouldn’t mind progress if it didn’t involve change. We sit in front of screens mumbling, "What does this message mean?" Even young people often don’t know the answers, which is heartening, since they’ve invented most of this mind-boggling nonsense. It’s like everyone in Silicon Valley is sniggering in a corner.

My favourite message recently was: "17 passwords have been compromised." By what? By whom? Have aliens landed? Should we all huddle under the kitchen table?

If you want to gauge how little people trust tech, go on a family walk in a foreign city, and ask, ‘Who wants to use Google Maps?’ I guarantee everyone will look away, as if they’ve just seen a long-forgotten cousin on the other side of the street. Why? Google Maps has been around for years, but it still takes 20 minutes to work out if you’re walking in the right direction.

My latest collision with tech happened when I lost my 60+ Oyster card – for travelling round London – in a restaurant (no, I wasn’t trying to pay the bill with it). After finally signing into the Transport for London website, it refused to accept my payment for a replacement. The same page recycled itself endlessly, each time curiously asking me for payment. Typical bureaucracy.

I eventually spoke to someone. Having talked to bots for days, I was surprised to come across one of our own species. But could this human fix it?

"I’ll need to talk to an engineer," he said through the ether. No response since.

The final straw came when my parking app sent me a text message in "sociable hours" to inform me something was ending at 11.59pm. I thought it was related to my trip to the dentist hours earlier. What it didn’t say was it was my resident’s parking permit. The next morning, I received a parking fine at 11am. If only it had used the English language instead of scrambling it through a computer.

Then there’s AI, which all seems like an in-joke. Just look at the names for different versions: Claude, Gemini… and Llama. Naming meetings must have made BBC mockumentary W1A look like a Cobra summit.

In an experiment, I asked AI for some new AI names. It came up with Nova, Quanta, Prisma, Cipher, and Aura – sounds like names of characters in a new Avengers Assemble movie.

I’m afraid this analogue man needs a good lie down.