Overthought, Overpaid, & Over Here...

A simple reflection on the avoidance of complication tonight. So many of what pass these days as aids to facilitate our daily activities and enhance our lives seem to serve the polar opposite in effect, erecting barriers where none existed before. What prompted this latest meditation on the loss of consensual common sense was the abject failure of one of the world's largest courier networks to deliver my replacement mobile phone to my house today, from a depot less than thirty miles from here. I know this is a crashingly first-world problem, but it exemplifies my point; the over-application of technology to achieve a relatively simple end: the delivery of a parcel to an address in a timely fashion, something that in all fairness, the old-school mail service has been capable of for centuries. In these frantically modern days of - too be frank - trying to take human initiative, and indeed as many humans as possible, out of the 'efficiency' equation, we have completely lost the plot in terms of of service fulfilment.

Delivery of anything to a postcode, no matter how rural, should not be difficult, but insert a mindless machine or two into the mix, take out properly-trained human operatives and shackle those left to a bunch of frankly flawed algorithms and ill-suited technologies, and you get less efficiency and quality of service as a result. This is most definitely not the fault of the poor buggers at the sharp end; tasked as they are not with  actually achieving the job in hand, but rather principally with satisfying the targets and metrics of the faceless entity of the corporate monster they work for. I know: I've been there, done that, and earned the bloody tee-shirt. We'll see whether they manage to actually achieve their simple task tomorrow. It would be nice, considering I've paid out good money - interest now accruing - for a product that I as yet do not possess: cart before the horse, anyone..?