If you’re over a certain age, you may remember a time when you could go buy a Thing - a television, a video game, a toaster, a doorbell, a smoke detector, or what-have-you - and when you got home the steps required were:

  1. Plug it in (or put batteries in it).

  2. Turn it on.

  3. Use it.

Well, gentle reader, I’m afraid those days are long gone. Steps #1 and #2 still generally hold…but man oh man, is there ever a whole lot of fuss before getting to #3 these days. You gotta connect it to the wifi, accept the EULAs, download the updates, install the app on your phone, connect your account (or perhaps accounts, plural)…

I helped my mother set up a new TV this morning. Her Samsung password is 27 characters long…and of course I typed a ‘q’ instead of a ‘g’. And of course i t deleted all trace of what I’d entered the first time so that I’d have the exciting opportunity of having to give it another go from scratch. It was a kind of sadistic carnival game: “Oooh! D’ya think I’ll get it this time, mom?” …and then we had to do Hulu. Disney+. Amazon Prime. “The Netflick”.

Fuck me, who would’ve thought that making a $400 electronics purchase decision with a retiree holding the pursestrings would be the easy part of the whole ordeal?

…and God help you if parental controls are involved. Trying to get Minecraft working for two children who want to play a LAN game together could be the subject of a whole other post. The tl;dr is that while the idea of parental controls seems good on its face - We must Protect The Children! - in practice they’re really just a roadblock to getting anything to actually work (short of disabling them outright).

Anyhow. I’m just blowing off some steam, in a decidedly “Get Off My Lawn” fashion.

Happy Friday, folks. And Happy inDay!