Me: Those unresponsive touch screens in cars that replaced knobs and buttons that were easily found and could be adjusted without taking your eyes off the road.
Change for the sake of change has always driven me crazy. It’s amazing how many people think that anything different and new is automatically better than whatever it is replacing.
Power features are useful in some instances, but do we really need electric motors to switch the temperature and direction the air is blowing into the car? My old Fairlane had switches that actually moved baffles that changed temperature and redirected the air- never had a problem for years. In the last 5 years I’ve had three vehicles where the motor went in the winter, and I had either only cold air (when it’s minus 30, that makes a vehicle undrivable) or the air only blew on the windshield, leaving our feet to turn into bricks of ice on long drives.
Microwaves used to have a dial to determine how much time to microwave. These disappeared and it was a difficult transition for some old ppl having to try to figure out all the digital “buttons”. This was compounded by every manufacturer of microwaves having different configurations of “button” use. New things with all kinds of features that users will probably never figure out, are often inferior in usage to the standard classics.
…Now where did I put that rotary phone?
The requirement for every (EU and more) website that uses cookies to implement explicit online acceptance by visitors was well meant but is enormously frustrating to everyone. This is especially true for mobile devices. In reality, no one reads these acknowlegements and people just try to close down the ennoying acceptance as quickly as possible without reading it. I believe, if we let the lawyers run the Internet, we would spend most of the time reading terms, conditions, closes, exceptions instead of getting to the information we want.
Kidding aside, I’d say that cell phones have decreased the efficiency of the average person more than anything else. It’s been my experience that people will spend hours a day on their phone instead of being active, then complain they have no time to do stuff.
They do provide a lot of benefits, but the negatives overwhelm them by a large margin.
I still have a land-line phone, but we get so many telemarketers calling, we don’t answer it unless we recognize the number. It’s just constant all day long. Yes, we’re on the “don’t call” list but it doesn’t seem to make any difference.