I've Had About Enough Of That...

Back in the good old days, when I rode my dinosaur to school and my father wore sabre-toothed tiger skins to work, we had one telephone in the house.  All four of us shared the one line, assuming you could pry it from my sister's hands long enough to use it.  One phone line.  Four people.  One house.  All was right with the world.
   Then came beepers.  Terrible little things, they quickly became the go-to device for medical professionals.  And drug dealers.  Who are, if you think about it, a kind of medical professional.
   After beepers came cell phones.  Laughably huge, they looked like field radios you'd see in old black-and-white WWII movies.  But they got smaller.  Much smaller.  And they got texting capabilities.  Now there was no need to actually use your phone as a phone, you could type what you wanted to say instead of talking to the other person.
   And the world got a little worse.
   Soon texting became The Thing.  Talking was so inconvenient, holding a conversation so last-Century.  Besides, talking means interacting, and who wants to do that?  It's much easier to type what you want to say, that way you don't have to deal with any feedback or engage anyone other than yourself and your personal solar system can continue to revolve around you and only you.  I'm surprised Baby Boomers didn't think of this thirty years ago.
   And I despaired.
   But just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, technology and self-centeredness prove me wrong yet again.  Yesterday I watched my brother-in-law use an app that let him - in essence - speak a text message.  It was still his voice, delivered as if it were a mini voice mail.  The person he was 'talking' to used the same app to send mini voice mails back.  He'd talk into his phone, like he was dictating, and then he'd send.  In a few seconds his phone would buzz and he'd get a 'voice text' - or whatever the hell it's called - from the person who had just heard his message, which came through on the speaker.  Back and forth, back and forth, when it would have been much simpler to just dial the Goddamned number and talk.
   Holy crap on a cracker, how horrible is that?  It was like using the phone if only one person could talk at a time while the other waited.*  What is the fucking point?  How is this an improvement on the awful practice of texting?  At least when you're getting a string of letters you can tell yourself the person sending it is in a meeting or otherwise occupied.  Getting this kind of almost-instant voice mail lets you know the other person is perfectly available to talk, they'd just rather not talk to you.
   I've said it before: just because you can doesn't mean you should.  Of course, since I find this new tech so awful it's going to be Number One with a bullet very soon.  It's like 'Seinfeld' all over again...


* in technical terms this is 'half-duplex.'  Like the two-way radios invented 100 years ago.