The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

[Wrathbone]

For us, it remains a tool - a flashier tool to be sure, but still a tool.

Absolutely this. I use my phone when I need it to do something, when it has a purpose beyond fiddling with it for no real reason. Most of my friends are increasingly difficult to talk to in person because any conversation is inevitably interrupted by them checking their phone for some reason. One friend in particular seems to automatically pick up his phone whenever I'm speaking, which is just fucking rude. Last time I met him I just stopped speaking mid sentence and he didn't even notice. It's at the point where I have to question what purpose friendship serves with someone who can't leave their phone alone long enough to listen to someone speaking directly to them.

[Lenny Solidus]

I am the only person in my family who can actively leave the house without my phone no problem, I hate feeling tethered to it and even if I do tend to use it its only for single use listening to music in one ear while I head to a destination or go about my business. It doesn't leave my pocket in general once I hit play and I love the fact I am capable of such a thing when everyone else I see have them in hand constant. You know when you are walking down the street and there is always that one person walking toward you with their face completely taken up by their phone, so you try to preemptively decide if they are going to look up or not before they walk into you or make you move so they can continue disregarding everything and everyone around them.

Fuck those people.

[Snowy]

A work colleague didn't believe that I average less than an hour of 'screen time' and couldn't see how that could be the case. When I told them pretty much what you have each said - it's just a tool - you could see the lack of comprehension.

[Lenny Solidus]

A useful tool is all they should ever have the right to be, especially as a parent when they obviously become invaluable. But then you recognise that the very same thing you rely on every single day to ensure your child is ok is also in turn the very same thing that distracts them from interacting with you 99% of the time...

Heaven forbid you accidentally get a glance at their screen as they sit before you and you see god knows what, I walked past Christina last night sat in the lounge and saw a moving gif of a completely naked man in her chat wiggling some boy from her school put up, I said nothing and just instantly attempted to erase that particular memory. From the back and kind of blurred thankfully, nothing more.

My son calls me, hey great lets have a chat. He facetimes me, no I do not wish to have an awkward conversation that doesn't flow at all naturally because I can see you walking around your house from a horrible angle I cant even tell if he can see me or not and its honestly distracting as fuck and I just cannot do it.

My other son comes round to see us his parents and within five minutes he's playing a game on his phone.

[Animalmother]

I was at a BBQ at the weekend and I've just realized that not a single photo was taken and the only time a phone appeared was to show a photo of a new cat someone got. Fucking bliss.

[Raid]

It's funny how everyone moans that this is a young person problem, but on my walk to work I see the same people glued to their screens every day and hardly any of them are kids. Not saying anyone here is wrong, but I think it's a more widespread issue.

I can't pretend I really understand it, but I guess it's all just FOMO, an irritatingly common term these days. As a society we've gotten used to having almost everything available immediately, but that's just progress for you.

I do wonder whether someone from the fifties would decry 24 hour news channels when you could instead just wait for the morning papers. They'd tell you that so much air time to fill lends itself to nonsense stories being published, or hastily written reports don't necessarily convey the facts correctly because nobody had time to analyse them.

[eny]

I call it narcissisolepsy...it is the real "unawoke-mind-virus" problem society faces.

[Wrathbone]

I've mercifully not had a Yodel delivery for a long time, until today. Impressively they now provide status updates for your parcel, and now that it's out for delivery I've even been given a map!

Except the map doesn't show the driver's location. It just shows your house, in case you've forgotten where you live.

There's also a thing saying there are 50 stops before me, but it hasn't updated in the last hour so either the driver has gone to Wetherspoons or it's a meaningless static number. It's nice that they're attempting to offer any sort of tracking system, but it does feel like they've gone to a lot of effort to produce something with the appearance of a tracking system with almost nothing useful about it.

[Mantis]

Clearly they took advice on how to engineer it from the people who designed Dominos pizza bot tracker. That thing is always convinced that my pizza has been delivered about twenty minutes before it actually arrives.

[Raid]

I suspect in the case of Dominos it's dependent on the people operating it. I haven't had one of their pizzas in a while, but it always seemed pretty accurate when I used it.

My own delivery woes this week are more to do with the seller than the courier. I ordered some new pc bits from Scan a few weeks back, paying extra for Saturday morning delivery, had an email from them at 10pm the day before the supposed delivery telling me they expected to despatch it that day. I figured the email was sent late as I couldn't imagine their warehouse working at that time. Anyway, it didn't arrive, no explanation was given (although it was almost certainly down to one item being a pre-order and they didn't process stock on time). At this point Snowy suggested I should complain because it didn't arrive on time, but given the timescales involved I changed it up to shit-happens, as I never specified a specific Saturday morning.

Cut to this week and I get the despatch email, it's been handed over to DPD. I check the tracking this morning, and have to manually tell them not to attempt delivery today, as they were going to do so. Clearly Scan haven't specified the delivery window I actually paid for, or DPD are incompetent, who's to say. What's the betting that the order will be delivered at any time on Saturday, because it certainly feels like I'm just lumped in with their standard delivery service. Scan are definitely getting a complaint now, as I'm almost certainly not getting the service I paid for, and I think I have enough ammunition to warrant a refund.

People moan about Amazon for all sorts of reasons, most of them justified, but their logistics put every other website to shame and I occasionally forget just how spoiled I am expecting the same service.

[Wrathbone]

I've had a similar experience with DPD before, having paid extra for a particular timeslot only for that to be ignored completely. DPD used to be by far the best, but they seem to be slipping.

My Yodel parcel turned up in one piece, thankfully. It was packed with a vast amount of industrial-level bubblewrap, presumably in expectation of Yodel's typical standards.

[Snowy]

My own delivery woes this week are more to do with the seller than the courier. I ordered some new pc bits from Scan a few weeks back, paying extra for Saturday morning delivery, had an email from them at 10pm the day before the supposed delivery telling me they expected to despatch it that day. I figured the email was sent late as I couldn't imagine their warehouse working at that time. Anyway, it didn't arrive, no explanation was given (although it was almost certainly down to one item being a pre-order and they didn't process stock on time). At this point Snowy suggested I should complain because it didn't arrive on time, but given the timescales involved I changed it up to shit-happens, as I never specified a specific Saturday morning.

I would have absolutely rinsed them myself, they have messed up when you paid for a specific delivery slot. Nobody pays extra for Saturday delivery thinking "might not be this Saturday of course..."

Have you had any kind of apology or explanation for the delay? If nothing else you are owed that!

[Raid]

I'm not sure if they even replied to my initial query as to whether the order was delayed or not, as the only email I got from Scan afterwards looked automated. It's pitiful really.

[Pew-Pew]

The phone zombie thing is waaaay worse here in Singapore. Far more people (mainly younger) walking slowly through MRT stations just looking at the manga or whatever on their phone. I also notice it walking around the university that I work at - the staff and students are mainly from China, and the vast majority walk through the corridors looking at their phone rather than their surroundings (like the beautiful tropical plants/trees etc.). No wonder everyone has myopia.

Personally I think I spend a bit too much time on mine too. For me it's mainly scrolling through Reddit when I'm sitting around and bored, e.g. on the train. It's definitely a way of avoidig eye contact with people. I was contemplating getting a smaller phone that would be less of a distraction and also less of a trouser weight (I have a S22 Ultra) but I really love the cameras on this phone. It was the main way that I recorded my memories whilst travelling last year with lots of beautiful photos. Might trade it in and get a smaller S23 though.

I feel weird leaving the house without it though, it is pretty vital to have on you nowadays.

[Snowy]

I always have my phone with me, mainly because I use it instead of money for the most part (although I almost always have my wallet on me too).