Forgot password? From food apps to help lines, tech is being used to frustrate us

I promise this column isn’t a mere whinge; that it is going somewhere serious. But allow me to take you through my morning, because I’m sure you’ve had this morning before, too.

It begins with an email from a fast(ish) food chain. I receive these all the time. This one offers a special, available on Tuesdays if you order through the store’s app. Just click on “specials” it instructs, and they’ll be there.

The enticement works. Having ignored such emails for months – for which I don’t ever recall signing up – I decide to download the app and give myself the option. I endure the account-making process, and sign in. I scour every drop-down menu, click on any vaguely related link. I can’t find one labelled “specials”. I have no doubt I’m missing something, but I figure it really should be dunce-proof.

Mildly inconvenienced, I move on to more serious things. I have a flu shot to book.

That booking requires an online form. I burst out of the gates: name, date of birth, address – I know this stuff! Then it asks for my Medicare number, at which point I discover I’ve misplaced my card. Brimming with confidence, I open my Medicare app. I’m greeted by a message saying the app is now obsolete – “retired”, I think it said, as though it was rewarding itself for a lifetime of service by finally pursuing its passions. Instead, I must download the myGov app, where my Medicare account now resides.

A mostly blank, blue page greets me, offering only an option to “Sign In”. I take it, and proceed to punch in my email address and what I think is my password. Apparently, I’m wrong. The app knows I’ve forgotten my details, but asks me to admit it anyway: “Forgot password” tuts the link. I swallow my diminishing pride, and click.

It wants to send me a code, and asks how I’d like it. “SMS”, I decide. I wait eagerly for the code-bearing text to arrive, like a kid on Christmas morning. Turns out I’m the Muslim kid who doesn’t get Christmas presents. No code arrives.

A blank box stares at me. “Code”, it demands. My phone stays emphatically silent. I have no code to give it. I go back a page, to start the process over again. This time I ask for the code instead to be sent by email. A new box asks for my email. Progress! I punch in the only email I use.

I check my inbox. I refresh. I refresh. Nothing. I check the app. It’s my old nemesis, the blank box. “Code”. This time I feel its indifference.

By now, I’m running late. I have an appointment in about 20 minutes, a tram leaving in about two, and it’s three minutes’ walk away. I run.

Perhaps it’s the fresh air, or perhaps it’s the mild state of panic, but I’m reminded there’s a whole non-digital world out there. Maybe the way through my administrative cul-de-sac is to forget about navigating apps altogether, and talk to an actual Medicare staff member. I realise it’s scandalously old-fashioned, but perhaps previous generations were onto something. My running has paid off. I beat the tram, and have a moment to look up the number. I find it, and call.

I don’t get a person.

What I do get is a recorded message informing me that all relevant people couldn’t possibly speak to me right now because they’re so overwhelmed with other callers. Maybe management has overestimated the usefulness of the app, and failed to roster on enough staff. Before I can complete the thought, I’m informed that the queue is quite long, and offered instead the chance to leave my number and be called back. Either way, it will take a little while for someone to get to my call. How long? About 20 minutes.

I give, and hang, up.

I won’t bother you with the rest of the story. There’s no fun to be had and no satisfactory resolution. There’s only the faint echo of that bad dream everyone has had where they spend all day trying to get to work but never make it. Except something about it is even worse because the perpetual obstacles in this case aren’t caused by random circumstance. They’re carefully designed. They’re also newly invented. They’re an example of one of the great perversions of our time: that while this is an age of unprecedented services on demand, and almost relentless convenience, it’s an age in which our dizzyingly brilliant technology also makes once-simple things difficult. Occasionally, even unconquerable. That’s how I’m confident you’ve had a morning like this.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about the cantankerous nature of this moment in time. The growing social antagonisms, the political unravelling, the increasing number of signs in supermarkets or pharmacies pleading with us not to abuse their staff, or the remarkable decline I’ve noticed in drivers waving to say thank you to someone who let them in. The widespread sense that the whole freaking system is out of order.

Like everyone else, I typically reach for the big things: the cost-of-living crisis; housing unaffordability; the trauma and psychological fragility left in COVID’s wake; the way the internet has fractured our culture and polarised us politically; the anxieties of climate breakdown or AI; the ramifications of a changed America’s trade and military wars; collapsing levels of trust in our institutions and each other.

But the little things matter, too. More specifically, the little things are often symptoms of something bigger. Mine was a morning of petty frustrations. But anecdotally, such things are increasingly triggering an irrational anger in us. They seem to symbolise how our institutions, whether companies or governments, keep offering us services that seem more in their interests than ours. Soon, we’re drowning in apps, having to enter constant passwords for basic services, feeling more like administrators than customers. And we’re battling government services that seem more remote, less accountable, almost brick walls by design. Some we can avoid, many we can’t.

On its own, it’s not terribly much. But added to everything else, it instils a sense of things being backward: whether as citizens or consumers, we’ve been gifted trappings so wondrous and sophisticated that now we must serve them.

Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist.

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