Humanity’s most infuriating inventions

Mankind has come up with some absolutely awesome stuff!  Polio vaccines, and Netflix, and back-scratchers, and candy bars, and Philly Cheese-Steaks, and (let’s be honest) sex toys, are among the pinnacle achievements of our race, and I’m thoroughly proud to count myself a human being whenever I have the chance to benefit from any of these, and a host of others…

Mankind has also produced some things that, quite frankly, suck so hard they blow.

We’ve been building cities for at least 10,000 years, for instance, and STILL the majority of them have streets oriented north-south and east-west, thereby GUARANTEEING that people using said streets will have the freaking SUN in their eyes, twice a day.  Chemical and Biological Weapons were introduced in antiquity, and promptly ruled so freaking awful that you shouldn’t use them in warfare, where, let’s face it, the whole point is to be as horrific to your enemy as you can possibly be!  Finding themselves unable to use Chem-Bio Weaponry, industrious warmongers promptly set about inventing Nuclear Weapons, had the gall to be surprised when THOSE horrified people, and followed-up with THERMONUCLEAR weapons, that were even MORE powerful and horrifying …

Horrifying and depressing as those inventions were, they nevertheless do not come CLOSE to topping the ‘annoying-obnoxious-infuriating’ list:  for that distinction, you have to turn to ‘texting’.

If you’ve been living under a rock, texting is the practice of sending text messages via the same little device that you paid hundreds of dollars and signed a 2-year contract to talk to people on.  The devices are amazingly cool, and tiny, and can do zillions of things beside the stated purpose of ‘talking to people’, but that doesn’t change the fact that they were originally designed to make use of our millions of years of evolutionary progress in human speech, promoting understanding, providing humor and comfort, and the warmth of directly hearing the words of a loved-one who might be many thousands of miles away.

Instead, people send text messages. And pay extra to do so!!!!!

I’m 52 years old, and lead a sad and lonely existence well outside of the mainstream of culture, so I can be a little behind the times, as I’m only too ready to admit, and can prove by the fact that I just did – but I also have freaking genius-level IQ and have never been called stupid, so WTF?????

I asked various young people, who seem completely enthused with text messaging, just what the big deal was, and every one of them looked at me like I had just wondered aloud why people didn’t enjoy playing with cobras (in point of fact, some do, but that’s a rant for another day.)

The answers they provided ranged from “it’s cool!“, a word none of them were able to adequately define, to ” ‘cuz you can do other stuff while you do it” …

Huh???

Ok, look, you freaking can not do other stuff while texting. Can. Not.  Texting requires the use of both eyes, both hands, and a fair chunk of each of the temporal and parietal lobes, both frontal lobes, and the occipital lobe of your freaking BRAIN.  Attempts to drive a car while texting frequently end in collisions. Attempts to watch a movie while texting frequently result in a pissed off date who paid upwards of $30 for tickets, popcorn, and your undivided attention, which you then, (ha-ha at the poor, stupid, naive bastard) divided!

The principal benefit of texting seems to be that you can communicate with someone who didn’t, couldn’t, or wouldn’t take the time to visit you, while the person who did take the time to come sit right next to your shapely ass, gets left out of the conversation.

We have spent millions, if not billions, of dollars devising technology to enable people to be epically rude, and people fork over multiple-millions of dollars yearly for the privilege!!! Not just being rude to the guy sitting next to you on the bus, because, ok, admittedly, he might deserve it for being creepy and sneaking peeks at your cleavage (which, admittedly, you bought an expensive top with a plunging neckline to display)  — but you also do it to your boyfriend, for whom you purchased the expensive top to allow sneak peeks at your cleavage, in the hopes that this would lure him into doing other things with said convolutions, and that is simply not cool, whatever the hell the definition of that word turns out to freaking be! (The texting, I mean, is uncool, not the manipulation of inviting sneak peeks for the purpose of inviting convolution manipulation, and the various sequel activities to which these things can, and do, frequently lead, except for me, damnit.)

(Ok, minor, but vital, digression required, here:  WTF is it with you people of the curvy and delectable persuasion going to monumental efforts to look curvy and delectable and then getting pissed when guys spend some time enjoying the fact that you’re curvy and delectable???? If you don’t want me to look, why go to all that freaking effort to draw my eyes???)

But I digress. Vitally, but, yeah, still. Where was I?

Right up there near the top of the ‘obnoxious-and-irritating’ list are the twin inventions of ‘Call-Waiting’, and ‘Caller-ID’.

“Oh, hi, it’s so great to hear from you, it’s been ages! Why don’t you text me more often? BEEEP Oh, hang on, there’s another call that might turn out to be from someone more interesting than you!”

‘Nuff said about ‘Call-Waiting’, I think.

‘Caller-ID’, by itself, might possibly have qualified as cool:  you pay the phone company to display information about who’s calling, so you can decide whether to waste your valuable time speaking to them … that might actually be kinda cool, right? Except the other lame asshole that you didn’t want to talk to can pay ATT even more money to not display the info that you paid them to display … WTF??? How, in the name of all that’s fair and just, could that be in any way fair and just??? Or legal? Isn’t it called fraud when you pay for something, and the people you paid to do that thing get to keep your money and not do it???  Look, if you paid a roofer to put a roof on your house, would you just shrug it the hell off if said roofer only roofed some of your house???  Would any court in this admittedly screwed-up land accept his explanation that someone else paid him more to leave a big freaking hole directly over your bedroom???

I think it’s time for my medication. I think it’s equally evident that I’m not currently on any medication.  For those of you who read my  “Polarity” posts, this is what is called a ‘mild hypomanic state’.  AKA “me-at-my-most-reasonable”. Deal with it.

~ by dourscot on January 7, 2012.