Previously I’ve written about my, I won’t say “aversion” to technology, but my general unease about it, which makes me sound like I’m one of those people who think Terminator’s Skynet will someday become a reality and take over the world. That’s hardly the case. Though Siri is a little unsettling sometimes. My unease isn’t so much paranoia but practical concern. Basically, I don’t trust it. It’s not dependable.
We live in a world of “smart” stuff: smart phones, smart cars, smart homes, which include smart outlets, smart light bulbs, smart appliances, smart thermostats, and so on. But for all this smart stuff, I find it mostly stupid.
Take for instance any smart phone’s texting app that attempts to intuit what you’re typing and offers up the next word or couple words that it “thinks” you’ll use based on context. In theory, this is a massive convenience. There are times that my iPhone correctly intuits long strings of words, making my job very simple and showing me that I’m not so diverse in my dialogues that I maybe hoped I was. But other times, I think this feature is dumb as rocks, as they say. Grammar is mostly lost on intuitive typing and a comprehension of tense is just nonexistent. I don’t how many times I’ve been texting in present tense and the phone offers up the past tense word I need along with two other completely inappropriate and/or useless suggestions. And every time this happens, I ridicule my phone: “Did you not see all the other verbs? In what verbal world do you live where you thought I needed the word ‘depended’ instead of ‘depends’ or ‘depending?’ Honestly!”
And then there’s auto-correct, which should really be renamed to auto-incorrect or auto-error or auto-now-I’m-going-make-you-look-like-an-idiot-and-change-the-word-“much”-to-“muck,”-despite-that-“muck”-has-no-relevance-to-what-you’re-typing.
Then there’s the lazy factor. I do think that all this smart business is making people less social and lazier as a whole. Of course, smart supporters would argue that today’s technology is saving us time and our time is of the most precious things we have. And I wouldn’t disagree, so long as these smart things worked properly.
A summer project of mine is a partial porch renovation. After years of tending to the painted wood balusters and railings, I’ve grown tired of the upkeep and am changing them to composite material, which is, of course, technology in another form, but based on my experience, it’s very dependable. Along with the upgraded balusters and railings and a few other aesthetic adjustments, I decided to change two of my can lights to flush-mount lights and install a ceiling fan into the third (with a very handy kit designed for this purpose). The fan is mostly to keep the mosquitos at bay while I’m enjoying an evening in our new outdoor sofa…or enjoying it as much as my two year old will let me.
The problem with this setup, though, is that I don’t want the flush-mount lights on and blazing up my porch while the fan is running. To spare myself the expense and hassle (and time!) it would take to rewire everything, I opted for smart bulbs in the flush-mount lights that I could turn off through my phone while I keep the power to fan going.
I admit that I was pretty excited to try these bulbs and their “million” color variations out, so when the Prime truck came, I was at my door in an instant. Not really, but you get my point. In reality, I think the package was out on my porch for three days before I realized it. So much for taking advantage of the benefits of two-day shipping. But my excitement was there when I got around to installing the bulbs, which went smoothly, as you can imagine, despite that there’s probably a joke hidden in there somewhere that starts with “How many journalists does it take to screw in a light bulb?”
The installation, though, is where the fun ended.
At first, I couldn’t get the bulbs to pair with the app, which resulted in me standing on my porch for the better part of an hour one night, phone in hand, while the bulbs blinked rapidly, which they’re designed to do to let you know they’re ready to pair but look more like a distress signal. It was only later that I realized I’d downloaded the wrong app, so I guess you could say that was one win for the smart object and one loss for the human. Unless you take into consideration that the app I downloaded was Smart Home when I should have downloaded Smart Home App. In my opinion, I’m calling that contest a scratch.
Proper app installed, round two was a success. The lights paired and only blinked long enough to maybe suggest to my neighbors that someone accidentally electrocuted themselves inside the house and caused some wiring to short momentarily. Excitement renewed, I spent about twenty minutes adjusting the color temperature…after trying out other crazy options like scarlet and teal and peach and coral and Hawaiian, which was a swirling blend of tropical-drink colors. In a light bulb!
Pleased, I shut off the lights, went inside, content. Until the next night when I turned the lights on to see how they held up only to find them blinking again, letting me know they’d lost their settings from the night before. Round three was not a success. It took me over an hour to get three of the four bulbs to pair while the fourth never did pair, though the app recognized it was there. It just wouldn’t cooperate. When I finally got them all to work, the time it took me to change four light bulbs was over three hours.
So while there are people out there who would contest that this smart technology is there to give us more time, I can only say that it’s never taken me three hours to change four light bulbs. In the occasional words of my father, “That’s just plain dumb.”
