I have many daily frustrations, and I have decided to start using this blog as an outlet for them. It’s a new ongoing series of Random Rants. Maybe some of them will resonate with you. The first is about apps.
We went to Alton Towers the other day. We go every year in the school holidays, and every year I download the app the day before, and delete it when we get home.
It’s genuinely useful while you’re there, but completely pointless the other 364 days of the year. Nevertheless, it has a purpose.
Then there are apps for things like banking, which are frequent use apps that I totally get. Or the School Spider app my kids’ school uses to send parents info and organise parents evening meetings etc. Again, fine. Totally necessary.
But there are also a lot of totally pointless apps. I’m talking about apps you are forced to use because it is the only way of doing something, even though a far easier way already existed before the app!
Take my hairdresser, for example. She’s great. She has a little shop on the corner one village over from us, she’s lovely to talk to and great at her job. I used to give her a call to book an appointment. It took two minutes. Then she joined some random hairdresser app, and now I have to download it every time I want to book a haircut.
It’s insanely annoying. Every time, I have to sign in, search for her, go into her calendar, choose my treatment, confirm my choices, accept some disclaimer… it’s soooo tedious. There is even a posh sandwich shop – I kid you not, a sandwich shop – near me that only takes orders via an app. Who do these people think they are!?
And don’t even get me started on parking apps. The amount of time I have wasted stood screaming in the car park as I tried to pay my £1.50 using an app when I had £1.50 cash in my pocket doesn’t bear thinking about.
Even my washing machine has an app, for goodness sake. I have never downloaded it, but that’s not the point.
I’m not anti-apps. But I am anti taking something simple and overcomplicating it for the sake of feeling cutting edge. That’s just technology for technology’s sake. Some things were just better done the old fashioned way.