Axolotl fan

I do not know where the app store is.

Okay, this lady explains to me (she is very good at customer service and there’s absolutely no sign on her face that she is baffled how someone like me can even be alive, even though logically she HAS TO be thinking that), it should be in your apps. Look at your apps.

I do not know how to look at my apps. I use like 4 apps (call, text, photos, music) and I put them on the front screen thing ages ago. I push all of the buttons on the phone and apps do not appear. There’s nothing in settings or anything either.

Try swiping up, she says.

I try this a few times. My phone does not register the contact. On the fourth time, it realises that I want it to do something, and oh, there are the apps. We install the app. We do all the sign-in and authentification code shit and it does not work. We do it again and it does not work again.

“If I had a checkbook I’d be out of here by now,” I say. She laughs because it is true. We’ve been here for twenty minutes. I restart my phone to see if that’s the problem and grumble under my breath about how banking never used to be so complicated. As I open the app again, I ask how people do internet banking if they don’t have phones.

She seems puzzled by the question. “We have ways for them to do banking,” she says, “but most… most people have phones.”

She’s probably right. You probably need a phone to survive if you’re homeless these days.

The program loads now but catches us in an endless sign-in loop and the problem, we learn from a supervisor who’s wandered over (presumably to see how helping one idiot put an app on their phone could possibly be taking so long) is actually not on my end. There’s something wrong with the version of the app that the woman assisting me has put on my account on the computer (that’s her half in this operation), so we have to uninstall the app on both systems and reinstall it. Fine. I uninstall the app. Now to go to the app store.

I have forgotten how to access the app store. I push all of the buttons on the phone and apps do not appear. There’s nothing in settings or anything either.

Try swiping up, the woman says.

Oh. There’s the app store.

We install it and get caught in an endless loop again but I am computer savvy enough to know that if restarting and reinstalling doesn’t work then sometimes just trying the same thing over and over again will make it work for no reason, and it does, after I sign in three times in a row we can FINALLY authenticate the app and I can FINALLY use it for two-factor authentication and I CAN FINALLY DO INTERNET BANKING AGAIN.

“Thanks for your help,” I say.

“No problem.”

“I’m sorry it took so long,” I say.

“It’s really not a problem,” she says, and because she’s a professional it’s totally convincing, but I have helped people with tech before and I know how much it sucks. I look at this woman who, on any other day, would be a good few years older than me, but not today. For today, I am a doddering 96-year-old woman who wishes for a simple chequebook and does not like smartphones.

I get up, and I pick up my bag and my walking stick, and I leave the bank, thinking about the scarf I’ve been knitting and how much more work I have to do on it. I wonder if I should bake scones tonight.

Just because something exists doesn’t make it a positive addition to my life. I also don’t have fancy clothes I won’t wear, or a subscription to any streaming services, or an expensive car (well I don’t drive, but if I did I still wouldn’t get an expensive car), or any internet-connected household appliances. Just because something has existed for ages doesn’t mean I have to want to use it.

Companies absolutely should not expect me to have a more up-to-date smartphone. My grandmother reluctantly bought a flip phone to keep in contact with family members in an emergency, but doesn’t like or understand smartphones. With this security system, she can’t bank at the library. The world is full of homeless or impoverished people who need phones to survive but absolutely cannot afford to keep fucking getting new ones. I have a lot to say about our high-consumerist, planned-obsolescence-laden culture, and I gotta say when companies expect you to get rid of perfectly serviceable handheld computers every two years and get a new one just so you can use their basic services, that is NOT reasonable. That is NOT okay. That is NOT an expectation that anyone should have. How would we be if people did that with clothes? You can’t eat in this restaurant unless the clothes you’re wearing were made within the last few years? It’s fucking stupid.

The only thing physically wrong with my phone is that the screen’s a bit scratched up and doesn’t register contact all the time, and for that reason I do intend to replace it; I’m waiting until I finish my job (ten weeks) before I change phone service providers to one that’ll let me use a cheaper handset. (Unlocked handsets are so much more pricey.) That’s a reasonable reason for me to get a new (very cheap, very basic) handset. “The new iPhone Zigglybob Jenga 4 is out so everyone needs the fancyphone!” is not, and basic life services like banking should not expect me to have a smartphone at all. (I would prefer a flip phone. I only went to smartphones in the first place because I needed Google Maps a lot; I don’t need google maps here but everyone’s forcing me to use sixteen billion apps to do anything instead.)

“Customers without smartphones are not second class customers, they’re customers.”

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