Front Porch: Laments over smartphones find plenty who would like to join the chorus

Whoo. Talk about a hot subject.

I wrote recently about how annoying automatic updates to my smartphone are and what a quandary those masquerading-as-acts-of-humiliation updates leave me in. Not to mention befuddled, annoyed and resentful.

I hate it when my limited abilities to navigate the darn thing that’s supposed to be a telephone but is in fact a whole bunch of other stuff, all of which make me disoriented when I am “blessed” with an update and the need, once again, to climb that steep learning curve, only to realize that I am barely capable of driving a dumbphone, no less this Ferrari I have in my hand that is designed to squeeze the last bit of self-confidence out of me.

Apparently a whole lot of other people have that same love-hate relationship with their “phones” and have told me so in some pretty colorful terms, and in great numbers. I hear you, brothers and sisters.

Please, do let me share some of what they’ve told me.

One man wrote how he has been programming computers since 1966 (including room-sized ones), but “so far I have refused to get a smartphone. I have no interest in texting. I have a camera for photos. I have five real computers at home for developing, emailing, surfing, etc.”

He has a flip phone. “The thing that will make me break my anti-smartphone vow is Uber. I am 81 and do not know how long I can continue to drive safely.”

Another man stands by his flip phone, too. His employer issued him a smartphone that is necessary for certain tasks at work. “I had to get a 20-year-old associate to help me set up the functions. The onscreen keyboard is so small, I’m always hitting the wrong keys with my fat fingers and my 60-plus-years-old eyesight. I miss the low-tech world, and they can have my flip phone when they pry it from my cold lifeless fingers.”

Another expressed frustration with “the heavy, plastic deck of cards I carry around which tries to ruin my life … those who spend time with me have heard me rallying against the tyranny of the device which forces me to scan a ‘bird dropping’ in order to park my car.”

A woman expressed that there is nothing more frustrating, after an unwanted-but-unavoidable update than “seeing something so totally unfamiliar that you have no idea how to do the things you did daily.”

One low-tech fan commented that “these frequent updates and ‘improvements’ mange to set me back several hours as I attempt to figure out what the hell they have done to the program I had finally figured out … My best fix for anything wrong is to shut the device off and hope it comes back in its original form.”

Another woman wrote me to say that her best friend’s husband is a software engineer who, in another city, does such huge jobs as putting entire municipal systems online. “He knows his stuff,” she wrote, “but when I take my phone to him to fix, he gets stuck as often as anyone else.”

I have my own personal update to the original column I wrote on this subject. On the very day the I-hate-smartphone-updates column came out, which was right after one of those I-can’t-find-the-damn-icon-I-need updates occurred, I suddenly became unable to answer my ringing phone – or rather, my ringing phone was unable to be answered. As far as I could tell, I was still capable of swiping to the right. I fiddled with it the best I could, including going online to research a solution. Nothing worked.

Off to the Verizon store I went. They did a bit of cleaning of the phone (pesky pocket lint), did a reboot and tried some other magic stuff to overcome the issue. It took an hour and more than one employee to fix it – but fix it they finally did!

I plead guilty to being dumb about all these things, but if the post-update problem flummoxed those guys, I maintain it’s not just me that’s the problem here.

Whining aside, there was the owner of a software business who emailed me and explained, sensibly, that laws change that require changes to the code, technology changes (requiring changes in programs) and customer demand for desired enhancements in a variety of computer systems, including smartphones.

He noted that in January there was a change in certain laws that only impacted 10% of his company’s clients. “But you cannot have 10 different versions of your system around, just because 90 percent don’t need that specific change. So I tell them that the governor made me do it; it was not my idea.”

And he noted that this is what programmers do. “Rather than try to develop a hugely complicated program from scratch, we usually break the program up into levels. Start with something simple, get it working and debugged, and have people start using it. Then add level 2 functions, get it working, etc. And so on. Forever.”

But why does it have zoom like a Ferrari into the lives of us pedestrians? I know, I know. Railing against the gods of technology is like stepping out in front of that oncoming Ferrari. And it is coming.

Thus it always was and thus it will always be. And so on. Forever.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net.