Once I turned 50, I started venting my frustration at the irritations of life.  It felt good, so I kept doing it.  I call these periodic and hopefully humorous verbal tantrums Old Man Rants. Let’s get to it:

The Phone Zone

Talk To Text

How can my talk-to-text phone app correctly interpret, spell and write down this sentence:

The symphony performed Charpentier’s “Prelude to Te Deum”.  It sounded great! Acoustics in the room were wonderful!

And yet sentences like this are often unrecognizable:

I’m taking the dog for a walk. Be back soon.

My daughter tells me that when robots take over the world they’re going to kill me first because of all the mean things I’ve said to Siri and other bots.  She’s probably right.

Facebook Comments

What’s with Facebook showing only the “most relevant” comments on a post.  What the hell do they know? Show all the comments as a default and I’ll decide what’s relevant- thanks.

Photo by Lisa Fotios on Pexels.com

New And Dis-improved

The iPhone lost its home button a year or so ago. But why?

What was wrong with the home button? It worked and was easy to use. The newer iPhones are supposed to be much cooler because you need only to swipe your finger across the screen to do the buttons’ job better and faster.

Very cool! As long as your finger is not wet, or even a bit damp, or covered with any sort of substance including food residue.  And as long as the screen is in pretty clean condition.  And as long as you swipe at exactly the right length at exactly the right spot.

In the time it took you to read this rant, I could have clicked my home button about 75 times. 

And facial recognition? That’s worked for me exactly 1 time.

Bring back the old, reliable home button!  And while we’re at it, what was so bad about plugging in headphones?

Yeah, I know, I’m starting to really sound like some old man getting passed by with new technology. But I just want the stuff to work quickly, reliably and with little effort and it seems like we’re starting to outsmart ourselves by making things too cool and hip at the expense of their functionality.

Ah! I feel better now, time to go chase some punks off my lawn.

For more Old Man Rants, plus articles of a more serious and useful nature, visit Five O’Clock Shadow, an online magazine by Todd Fulginiti.