Are you a Grumpy older person?

I can thoroughly appreciate how you feel TheCatWoman  My view is that tech is neither good nor bad in itself, it's how it is deployed.

Some tech deployments make things better but others make things worse. Mechanical washing machines (repairable) are good, AI slop is bad (as seen here the other week and in the Trumposphere).

In my lifetime, I have seen a shift from institutions carrying risk and undertaking services for citizens to risk being carried by citizens who have to do much of the servicing themselves.

This was sold to us as convenience and as reducing cost to us but frankly private institutions and their shareholders have trousered the cash and made a lot of people redundant!

Not everyone has the cognitive ability, motor skills, memory, skills or money for devices/data to lead a digital-first life. 

Very good thread and one that could keep going. I've lived so long I deserve to be Ms Grumpy as  kind of reward ! I find grumpiness useful as it drives me to do things. I email manufacturers with gripes - and often receive thanks even if they can do little. I email MP's with concerns as it gets these off my chest so I can fill my brain with nice things. I enjoy shouting at TV just as I shouted for my team at football matches (it's easy to offload emotions without stepping outside my door). I enjoy moaning of the cost of living, then I can buy things I want (but don't need) at the supermarket or online without guilt.

I want appliances not to have 'programmes' but buttons and dials marked with symbols that make sense. I don't want a manual the size of a brick sent with everything I buy, like 'how to wash and care for' my new RSPB feeder. I don't want to 'see' into my fridge until I open it (I don't like horror films). I enjoy complaining of the fast pace of everything then enjoy tying AI in knots with ridiculous questions to make myself laugh. I enjoy asking assistants to reach me things from the top shelf, because it makes me happy when people are willing to do things for me that they wouldn't do for younger people.

Having spent some of my childrens first months doing washing by hand, I fully appreciate the joys of an automatic washing machine.

I'm glad I don't have to crawl around the floor with a dustpan and brush trying to sweep crud from the carpet.

I love my humax box that allows me to record and pause live telly, I don't know what I did without one.

I love my kindle.

I can't imagine life with a food processor or a freezer.

But, its the way we seem to be having less and less choice about how and where tech is used and integrated into our lives. For instance, I don't want a satnav in my car, I find them very distracting, but all modern cars seem to have them and it's difficult to turn them off, and some can't be turned off. Many people seem to be suspicious of those of us who don't want a smart phone, don't use social media and aren't always online and available. I often leave home without a phone, because I don't want to be contactable, I don't know how to use a smart phone and I when I look at social media stuff I don't see whats in it for me and some of it is so annoying I want to kill it.

I don't know how to use online banking, I want to be able to use a carpark without having all this tech stuff, I want to be able to manage my bills myself, I want to have a bank statement sent to me every month and not have to faff around all the time.

So as you see I'm not anti tech, I just want the choice over what and how I use it.

I was blessed with a natural resting angry face so I generally appear a bit grumpy. I must admit that some things do bother me more than they did. 

Manners and consideration for others seems to have taken a huge step backwards. People walking about with their phones on speaker or gave timing , driving skills and not indicating at junctions and roundabouts (this should be a capital offence). 

Also since the pandemic many people seem to have adopted a sense of entitlement and are often quite aggressive and I really don't like it.

So in short being a little grumpy is understandable.

Usually positive but can be grumpy about poor service.

Trigger warning:

(N)evri.

I believe it has always been like this, your words echo my parent’s concerning “new fangled gizmos”, for which read - colour tv, automatic washing machines, electric lawn mower, remote control devices. Go back a bit further and it was simple things such as telephones, speed limits, seat belts, and so on.

Progress happens, it is inevitable as humankind is curious and experimental, we are always going to discovering the new. And given the young, statistically, have greater learning capacity and more flexibility of thinking then statistically its going to be we oldsters who struggle with progress. 

I was feeling this malaise (grumpyness) myself but understood that it was a road only to constant unhappiness, and unpleasant for others in my life. So Im consciously embracing change and up to date technology, for example I bought an iPhone 17e a few days ago and am learning how to make the most productive use of its incredible features, my previous phone was a very early smart phone with limited abilities. And after a couple of years with dug-in-heels Im embracing a safe use of AI. And you know, this embracing of change is bringing rewards every day, each little piece of learning gives me a small self esteem boost. And I believe my cognitive skills are improving and that slowing the aging process. 

As for supermarkets, I agree about the one you mention, but they are business and they do these things to reduce costs and maintain or increase profits. I think our answer to their annoying re designs is to shop at small independents, we have a friendly farm shop and equal distance to the supermarket, to buy books from real bookshops, and so on.

I apologise if Ive given a serious answer to a slightly light hearted question but as always what I actually hear is the literal meaning of language. 

Alice

Negative about negativity = positive!

McFrost said:

I have to admit that I find the whole grumpy old woman / old man thing really tiresome

Glad you got that off your chest! 

Right.

We have an new updated tesco and it's horrible, they seem to have more fridges and freezers but appear to be selling a smaller range, naturally veggie stuff is crammed into one corner and isn't restocked as often. Stock levels are a problem with all our supermarkets, partly because whenever the ferries enter or depart people go through our supermarkets like a plague of locusts.

Speaking of supermarkets, does it seem to others that we're being made to settle buying things we don't really want or have to use alternative suppliers? My Mum has sensitive skin and finds the Simple range really suits her, but there's only one place that sells it now, our new and improved tesco no longer seems to do any products for those of us with sensitive skin, not just in the body care ailse either but in the laundry and washing up aisles too. I don't believe theres been a sudden drop in the numbers of people wanting sensitive skin products, I think it's more a case of won't sell it rather than no enough people want it.

I have to admit that I find the whole grumpy old woman / old man thing really tiresome and I rail against it in myself as much as I can. I see it really as someone losing touch with the new and failing to catch back up so taking out their frustration with that on younger people. It's similar to the rose tinted, everything was better in my day thing and I can't bear that. Some things are definitely shitter now and some things are better. I am middle aged, and interacting with grumpy older people only strengthens my determination that I will not end up like that -  tediously whingeing that not everything is how I want it to be.

Sorry if that sounds really harsh Catwoman, it's not aimed at you! My mil is like this - just constantly moaning about everything and it drives me nuts!

AlanRalph said:

perhaps that's just hard-coded even if you're restarting a program from partway through?

It used to work seamlessly without the advertisement and there isn’t an option to change a setting. They think it will make people watch more BBC rather than Prime or Netflix etc.  

AI is so unreliable. It has a terrible habit of taking random pieces of information out of context and filling in the blanks, resulting in kinda inaccurate information 

I'm a grumpy younger person! I too get annoyed when they try new, asinine ways to "improve" things that don't need improvement.

I bought my kindle at the start of lockdown and it's still going strong, I dread the day when I need a new one.

Sorry that so many of you are getting duff results on searches, but I'm also glad that it's not only me. I don't do online supermarket shopping, I looked and then found that I could only get the smallest size packs of things like rice and pasta, all were 500g sizes which work out dearer than a 1kg pack, it was like 1kg packs didn't exist. I so rarely use the internet now, I just read the paper, emails and come on here, I don't use ebay temu or any of the others, so many of them outright lie about what the product actually and the sizes are all wrong.

There are many things I shout at, FAQ's being some of them.

I think search in general has been getting worse, at least on platforms like Google and Amazon, for a long while due to context overload from years and even decades of profiling of users. AI has just accelerated that process. I remember going through my Amazon recommendations on my original profile (from 1998) and marvelling at how it was still recommending stuff that I'd lost interest in back in the 2000s. It's amusing in a way, these companies have worked so hard to stop competitors, yet they've also sown the seeds of their own destruction at the same time.

ASDA recently revamped their website, making searching for things a lot worse in the process. No more multi-item search for instance, so clearly none of the designers have ever used a shopping list. And some searches turn up completely different things depending on what words you use.

I don't use iPlayer that often, so I've not run into that problem, but yeah it's not good. I think they do an advert before starting playback anyway, so perhaps that's just hard-coded even if you're restarting a program from partway through? I get why the BBC feels they need to remind people of all the stuff they get for the TV licence fee, but it seems they're damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Any Kindle made in 2012 or earlier is getting cut off completely from May 20th. They already couldn't connect directly to the Kindle bookstore, but could still download purchased books. After that date, they won't even be able to do that.

Having said that, there's nothing to stop you connecting the Kindle directly to your computer and transferring ebook to it that way, as the Kindle appears as an external drive. No jailbreak required for that, I think.

AlanRalph said:

Amazon's announcement that they'll stop supporting older Kindle devices entirely from next month

Oh no really? I'll have to go look that up, that's such a shame. It's all greed, they see people being forced to upgrade their phones because they aren't supported, and they want to force their customers to do the same. 

If they cut mine off at some point, I'll not be getting a new one. I can be grumpy too.