Too Frickin’ Uncool

In a recent post, I talked about technology that is so wonderful it makes you say, “Too frickin’ cool!” Lately I have been experiencing the other kind: too frickin’ uncool.

I’m in Indian Wells, California today. It’s an 82 minute flight from home. We were delayed at the airport for FOUR hours. That’s frickin’ uncool. And when we finally got on the flight, we couldn’t even surf the Internet. I felt like a caveman. That’s frickin’ uncool too.

Upon landing, my wife and I rented a car with a navigation unit whose user interface was built by the Taliban. It is so hard to use that it compares unfavorably with the alternative of “driving around lost.” The display shows the street you are on, but DOESN’T label any of the cross streets. And the street signs around here are tiny and unlit, so you have to come to a full stop and squint every block. Despite dedicated effort with the navigation unit, we never figured out how to enter an address. Too frickin’ uncool.

But that’s no problem, I figured, because I had cleverly used Google Maps to create a printed set of directions. Eventually, after realizing that our friends probably didn’t live in an abandoned warehouse, we called them and found that Google had sent us 15 miles in the wrong direction. And it did so with a great deal of confidence. It repeated this trick with our hotel, but only two miles off. Too frickin’ uncool.

I suspect that our navigation problems won’t matter anyway, because the car’s transmission went out last night on the way home. Too frickin’ uncool.

In a minute I will take a shower. I will have to guess where to put the shower knob to produce warm-but-not-scalding water. Is there any good reason the shower controls can’t help me out a little? Do I really need to put a mark on the shower wall with my Sharpie so I can find it easily tomorrow? Too frickin’ uncool.