A Day in the Life

It is often a good idea, when examining the overall use of technology, to step back and take a look at how you use technology over the course of a day. So I tried to make a note of every piece of technology I interacted with over the course of an average day...

07:30 - Wake up and hit snooze on my iPhone alarm. Several times. I've always been slightly confused as to why it is easier to turn the alarm off (slide bar as when answering a call) then it is to hit snooze (touch a button in the middle of the screen - hard to do with your eyes shut so you can't feel the relative position of the button as in an unfamiliar), and therefore I frequently oversleep. I also resent that I can't change the length of snooze - it's stuck at 9 minutes, but I'd like 5 - so a way of simply changing this would be great. Maybe it's time for me to get a purpose built alarm clock? Check my emails, Twitter and BBC News before I get up.

07:45 - Turn on the grill to make toast. I've ranted endlessly about the frustrations of my oven - symbols rubbed off, no tactile way to position the knobs, well below eye level so can't tell position from standing position, and generally non-sensical. Head to the shower while grill heats up.

08:00 - Back to kitchen, turn on radio while tidy up and make toast. I love my digital radio, as it's very simple to use - only 10 buttons, but the labels make it self-explanatory without forcing you to read the user manual. Meanwhile, I know down the pile of kitchen appliance menus I have stuck to the extractor fan.

08:25 - Drive to work. My car is lovely and ancient, with very little in the way of scary computer stuff inside - it seems a lot more mechanical. My only frustration is the radio, which has seven buttons (five are radio presets) and a knob for on/off, volume, and click tuning. You can only alter the radio station by clicking this knob, which will then scan upwards until it finds the next station. Not really a problem in Brighton, but when I visit London it takes about 30 minutes to find 106.8 through the thousands of pirate stations. Forget the radio for the morning and plug my iPod into the fm transmitter device.

09:00 - Arrive at work and swipe my ID card to get into the building. Sometimes I wish I could have an RFID tag in my watch, as am always forgetting my badge - no pockets to put it in.

09:05 - Fill up my water bottle with a ridiculous water dispenser. Five buttons - one to get water, two which seems to signify cold (but look identical and don't seem to do anything when pressed), two which signify hot, one with a plus which increases the temperature of hot water, the other just selects hot water when on default cold dispensing mode. Will never understand this thing.

09:10 - Switch on work Windows computer and wait 10 or so minutes for it to boot up and log in. Open Lotus Notes (the bane of my life), a piece of terribly designed email/calendar/to-do/contact management software. My company has been talking of replacing it with Outlook for over a decade, but has not yet gotten around to it. Spend the rest of my day wrestling with XP, IE, Word etc.

12:30 - Head to lunch and pay by credit card in the canteen. I don't understand that you can visit 10 shops in one day and each will have a different card payment system - so often I have no idea where to put my card, which way up, how to effectively disguise my PIN from evil-doers watching me... Watch some news on TV in the canteen, though not totally sure what's going on as the sound is turned off and I'm not that good at sign language.

14:00 - Have a phone call with colleagues around the world. The telephone system (Cisco phones using VOIP) at work are actually quite enjoyable to use, as you feel clever when it works. We also have a Webex screen sharing program at work so we can all collaborate on a document - not quite as simple to use.
16:20 - Have to use yet another part of the company intranet which requires a 30 minutes "training course" before I can use it - and afterwards I feel even less in the know than before. I use so many systems each day, each with COMPLETELY different login systems and interfaces and conventions.

18:15 - Arrive home after drive from work. Heating is not on so have to examine the boiler to see why it's so cold. The pilot light is out, and as there is no manual and I know nothing about boilers, have to go online to try and find out what to do. For something which is quite important, they make it really (physically) inaccessible and hard to understand what to do, even setting the timer takes forever with the fiddly little dial.

18:45 - Cook some dinner on the hob and in the microwave. This is a piece of equipment which is again, simple to a fault. A dial which I only figured out what it was after two years, and three buttons for various functions. I only ever use one - to add 30 seconds to the cooking time - and just press this to get to my required time. Sure there's meant to be a better way, but that would involve reading the 2cm thick user manual.

19:35 - Check my email on my MacBook Pro. I love my Mac. Turn on the TV connected to my Mac Mini which is used as a media centre, which I can control remotely using my laptop. Could go on for hours about my love for Apple, but will save that for another time.

20:00 - Friend comes over and we play Wii games. As someone who isn't a conventional gamer, I love the child-like simplicity of the Wii, in how it's so easy to figure out yourself how it works. It probably helps that as a Mac user I'm not constantly afraid that I will break the system, as most of my less technically inclined friends seem to be.

22:15 - Have to print out some documents to send to my bank. My printer is another tool which I probably only use about 5% of the functionality of as it tries too hard to be simple. Printing and scanning are fine for the time being.

22:30 - Head to bed, checking my email and Twitter and setting the alarm clock on my iPhone before going totally lo-fi and opening my paper book - no Kindle for me just yet...

I'm sure there are lots of other pieces of technology which I forgot to include as I simply don't regard them as "technology" - such as taps, light switches, automatic doors. And of course each thing I interacted with has many different elements e.g. the car has heating, lights, ignition, doors, radio etc., that I couldn't comment on them all even if I was aware of them all. It was still very interesting to analyse what things regularly annoy me, and which I've just now started to phase out.