I rode my bike in the rain today.
Oh, that wasn’t my intention, I assure you. When I started out, it was a cool and cloudy day, perfect for a bike ride of 12 miles or so. But the drizzle began by the time I hit mile four, so I turned around. By the time I got home, I was pretty wet.
I might have known that would happen to me if I had only checked a radar map before I started out. But when I tried to do exactly that on my cell phone, no map came up on my screen.
That’s because The Weather Channel app on my phone decided to improve my life by informing me in agonizing detail about how much grass, tree, and ragweed pollen I might encounter. And by cautioning me that a sunburn might be possible after 27 minutes under a UV index of 5. And that Ozone was holding at 62.26 ug/m3. And that Flu-A is now accounting for 97 percent of all infections, with only 2 percent coming from Flu-B.
And apparently those new features took up so much space, there wasn’t room left for the old radar map. It was gone.
I later found that the radar map had been subsumed into a little tab at the bottom that required an extra click to reach. I suppose I should be thankful that it only took getting wet to find it, and not an unexpected appointment with lightning. A drenching and an extra click is a small price to pay for improvement, I guess.
But that’s not the only way that my life has been cursed recently by the improvement bug:
I have two Yahoo email accounts that I use on a regular basis, and it has always been easy to move from one to the other. Whichever one I’m on, a single click on a link sends me to the other one, and a single click sends me back.
But a couple weeks ago, Mama Yahoo excitedly told me how much she was going to improve my life! And when I clicked on my email, there it was – a new screen that looked nothing like my old screen, with shading that made it difficult to see which emails were new, and which I had already read.
Worse, I couldn’t find an expected email that I knew should have been sent to me. After a while of noodling around the site, I learned that’s because Yahoo had improved my email experience by first listing only “priority” emails — vitally important communiques like seed catalog brochures.
If I wanted to see messages that Yahoo judged to be less important — from my bank, or family members — I had to click on the “all” button to find them.
But how to get back to my other email account? Where was that handy button I always clicked?
Gone.
It took a while to learn how to jump to my other email, and now my improved Yahoo experience lets me toggle back and forth with only a few more clicks than it used to take, back when I was unimproved.
But all this pales in comparison to the ways Xfinity (Comcast) has improved my life ever since they ran new fiber optic lines in my neighborhood over the past year or so to replace the old cables that seemed to be doing just fine.
A technician came on Tuesday a couple weeks ago and spent two and a half hours in my house hooking up the new fibers. He also swapped out my modem and cable box. When he left, he assured me that I would now have much improved sound and picture on my TV when I watched 4G films. Or maybe he said 5G films. Something with more G’s than I used to enjoy without knowing how much better my unimproved G-starved life could be.
Within an hour after he left, my TV didn’t work.
He came right back and installed a new box.
And then another one on Wednesday when that one died.
And then a team of technicians came with a third one on Friday when that one died.
The following Tuesday, with my Internet out again, the Operations Manager and Field Supervisor came to check out my fiber connections, which they said had been installed improperly. They fixed that connection.
They also got my printer working — which had died after the new modem was first installed. And they also got my cell phone to reconnect remotely with my thermostat, which had also died.
So now everything was fine. I was living the dream of an improved life!
But this morning my Internet was popping in and out. I hoped it was faltering not only in my house, but all over my development—which, I hate to say, would be a comfort. Misery loves company, I guess.
Besides, if the whole neighborhood were out, I would get to spend a little time complaining with neighbors on the sidewalk who, if the Internet were working, would have been glued to their devices. Which, of course, I would also have been doing.
Besides, without the Internet, we would all be spared the frustration of cursing at our improved Weather Channel or Yahoo email, which need the Internet to work.
Sigh.
If things get desperate enough, I might go read an ink-and-paper book, which seems to work just fine without further improvements since Gutenberg invented the printing press 600 years ago.
Anyway, I hope you eventually get to read this, because I use the Internet to send stories in to my editor. So if you can’t find me in the paper today, that’s probably what’s going on.
I’ll leave it to you to decide if a week without Planet Kerth is an improvement.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com – if the Internet is working.
