Useless Technology

It is a total cliche that "new and improved" things are always new, but often not improved. It's New Coke Syndrome. I don't what that stuff was, but it wasn't Coke and it stunk. (Of course, there is the whole theory that New Coke was a corporate conspiracy to get lots of free publicity. If that is what they intended to do, hats off to them.) This "new and improved" stuff can be pretty irritating. As I'm sure you know, computer software gets updated constantly. Now many attorneys -- like me -- use their word processing software probably 1/2 the time every day, so we get to know and love particular versions of that software. We get to know what keystrokes work for the functions we use all the time. We get to know exactly what to click to make stuff work. Do the software companies ever consider this when they update their software? Hell, no. Everything changes in each new version, so you have to relearn the software. (I, in particular, am a major devotee of WordPerfect. The legal profession seems to be the only sector of the world that has resisted the Borg-like advance of Microsoft Word. It therefore drives me nuts that when Corel makes changes to WordPerfect that force us to relearn stuff. What better way to drive people to the Dark Side? I know one attorney who still almost weeps at the loss of WordPerfect 6.)

Useless technology pops up all over.

Don't get me wrong, I really like a lot of technology-related stuff. Don't know what I'd do without the Internet. For example, late West Coast baseball games end late enough so that their results often don't make the next day's paper. Before SportsCenter, if you didn't catch the late news, you sometimes didn't know how a game turned out until two days later. Now, with the Internet, you can follow every pitch of every game as it's happening. Plus you can Google anything and get good search results pretty much effortlessly.

But I have had some useless technology in my life lately and it's kind of irritating.

Specifically, because my car is in the body shop after The Thump, I have a rental. My insurance company covers the cost of the rental. Needless to say, they pay for a cheap rental. The rental, though, has little extras. It has the one-push all-the-way-down power windows. It has the stereo controls that are attached to the steering wheel.

And it has a stereo that adjusts the volume up or down depending on how fast you're going.

This adjusting volume thing is really irritating because it isn't really sensitive enough. When you're at a light, the volume gets really low and you have to bump the volume up. You leave it alone and, when you get to the freeway and start going 75, excuse me, 65, now it's blasting your ears and you need to bump down a whole bunch. It's really great when you're in stop-and-go traffic and it's adjusting itself up and down every 30 seconds.

Why, why, is this necessary? Why did Ford think this was a good thing? I have never really had a problem regulating the stereo volume. You pretty much set it where you like it and go. Different CD's or different radio stations have different volumes, so you adjust it. I never noticed that I needed to adjust it depending on how fast I was going. Actually, I don't think that I need to do that at all. It's useless, pointless technology

You know some serious money went into the technology that is necessary to make the automatic stereo volume adjuster work. There has to be some software that conveys how fast the car is going to the stereo. There has to be some software that decides the relationship between the car speed and the stereo volume. Someone had to do some work to make this work. Let's take that money and send some more Kevlar vests to the soldiers in Iraq.

And yet it's useless and irritating. Hopefully, it at least was standard equipment on the car so that no one had to pay extra money for it.