Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans.
At least that's how the famous quote (attributed to the late John Lennon) goes and the older I get, the more I come to believe there is a substantial amount of truth to it.
This past week — following the UFO/Paranormal Summit and Convention we went to last weekend — has been pretty much a blur, and I am reminded once again of just how much effort and time it takes to catch up with stuff even when you've been away for just a few days.
It seems like we don't really have time for life as we imagine it, because we're so mired down in life as it already is.
Meanwhile, the irritant of this morning was the fact that the voice-to-text feature on my phone seems to have turned into a blithering idiot.
It's annoying because it's a feature I use extensively to "take notes" and "write" sections of posts as ideas come to me while I'm sitting in parking lots or wherever I am not at my computer.
I realize it probably just has something to do with adjusting some settings somewhere, or updating some bit of code... but it is so representative of the part of modern life that I get extremely frustrated with. You spend so much time installing and setting stuff up to save you time and be more convenient that you're actually not saving any time in the long run!
Anyway, I'm finding this to be annoying enough to vent about here because it is one of my few time saving things I actually use my phone for (aside from making calls) and now it seems to be scrambled and unusable. Oh well!
I make no secret of the fact that one of my general frustrations about modern life is technology that doesn't work.
When I say that what I really mean is technology that was created in service of "making life easier" but was done so with the primary objective of being inexpensive... as a result of which it doesn't actually do the job it allegedly sets out to do.
Which brings to mind all those small subscriptions you end up with that don't actually do anything cool or help you in any way whatsoever... they did one cool thing at one time and that was that.
However, their makers probably are figuring that the $1.99 a month it costs to have Whatever-The-Hell-App-It-Is or subscription — combined with an overwhelmingly complicated cancellation process — is so little you're not gonna bother to spend 30 minutes in frustration to cancel it and so essentially you sit there and end up paying $1.99 a month for absolutely nothing!
Until the day finally comes when you realize that you're out $40 for pretty much empty space...
Of course that's pretty annoying because some of us actually live a life where $1.99 a month — especially when you added up multiple times you've been charged — actually adds up to something meaningful... like a dinner. Or a tank of gas for your car.
Growing up — in the age of predominantly print media — I recall that my dad never subscribed to anything, preferring instead to buy newsstand copies of publications when they looked interesting.
We were financially pretty well off, so it was not a matter of being able to afford things, but instead a matter of being categorically anti-wastefulness.
"Why get 12 magazines in your mailbox when you likely will only have time to read TWO of them?"
So don't be wasteful and careless with money... you never know when you might need it for a burger. Or a tank of gas!
Thanks for visiting, and have a great remainder of your week!
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Created at 2024-05-15 00:13 PDT
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