My Toaster Needs Instructions… and I’m Not Okay With That

It started with a toaster.
A simple, innocent appliance whose only job used to be: bread goes in, toast comes out.

But not anymore.

In this episode, I spiral (gracefully… mostly) into the modern insanity of “smart” everything. What used to require one button now demands decisions, settings, updates, and—at one point—reading the manual… for a toaster. A toaster.

From there, things only get worse.

We take a walk down memory lane to a time when:

•  TVs had knobs instead of software updates 
•  Cars didn’t beep, blink, and emotionally judge your driving 
•  Phones stayed in one place and didn’t double as a space shuttle control panel 
•  Computers didn’t collapse into useless bricks the second Wi-Fi sneezed 

Somewhere along the way, simple became complicated… and “advanced” started feeling a lot like “annoying.”

This episode is a humorous rant about modern technology, everyday frustration, and the quiet suspicion that maybe… just maybe… we’ve made everything way harder than it needs to be.

Also:
 If the power ever goes out, we’re all standing around like confused squirrels.

Enjoy.

Transcript

You know, recently my wife bought me a toaster for a gift. I've been wanting a toaster for a really long time. And all my memories of toasters are you use them at a toast stuff like bread or bagels or, or even frozen waffles, right? And you put them in the slots and you press the, the, the knob down and poof, you get toast a few minutes later.If it's too dark, you turn the button like back and make it lighter. And if it's too light, you'd turn the button the other way or the knob, and it makes your toast, you know, darker. So she gets into this toaster and it didn't just have the push knob.You plug it in, which right, you need power for your toaster. And then all of a sudden you have to hit a power button, like a power on button. And when you press the power on button, all these, these pictures light up and on one side is the darkness.This tells you how, like, how dark do you want your toast? And there's little pictures. I get to see the picture of how dark I want or how light I want it on the right side were pictures of things. I might've liked to toast like a waffle or a bagel or a piece of bread or something like that.So I had to choose. So instead of just taking my bread and putting in the toaster and pushing down the handle and getting toast. Now I've got to decide, am I in a dark toast mood or a little bit lighter toast mood? And what am I? And what am I toasting? Now, if, if you're a real rebel, you're like, you want to put something in there.It's like, ha, go ahead. You figure it out. Well, it's not going to figure it out because if you put the bread in and you hit the bagel setting, you're going to get like bagel fried bread or something like that.And I was wondering if, how, you know, how does the toaster know if you put in a bagel or a piece of bread, unless you tell you what, what you, what you put in. And I say all that because when did all this technology happen with a toaster? Like, I don't know, as a kid, when you were growing up, did you press buttons to make toaster or you just put the bread in or the stuff in, you push the knob down and you got your toast. When did it start happening that we had to be so complicated about everything? Like, you know, it was so, it worked great.What, what was the problem with the toaster when I just pressed the knob down and I got toast out of it to the point where now I have to press a button just to turn on the lights that are going to show me what I'm going to put in that toaster. And there's going to be a decision made there. And then I had, I had to read direction.I had to read directions on how to use a toaster. And it told me if I put in a bagel, I've got to put it in outside in or inside out or something like that. So that I get the insides toasted of my bagel.Cause I didn't want the outside toasted. Like I wanted the inside toasted. And I just, I, well, I didn't give up.I got toast. Don't worry about it. I made it.But when, when did that happen? When did our toasters get so smart and so complicated? What was wrong with them so long ago? When did things get so complicated and stupid? Am I, maybe I'm the only one. I'm overreacting to this, right? I like things simple. I like them easy.I like them just, you know, when you do one action, something happens. Very simple. You know, for, for example, TVs, what happened to TVs? When I was a kid growing up, you would walk up to the TV.You had two dials. It was like what? UHF VHF. And you turn, you got your what? Three or four channels, two, four, seven, whatever.And then the bottom channel, 50, 62, whatever that was. And you just turn the knobs. And what was really cool is as soon as you turn the knob, the channel changed.It was, it was miraculous. It was very simple. Okay.So you had to get out of your chair. Boo hoo. Nowadays you have to get a remote control and you have to have the batteries in and heaven forbid if you don't have the right batteries, your batteries go out because if they go out, there's really no where you're on the new TVs to actually hit a channel button.So then you got to go digging through drawers and find new batteries and put in your remote control when you could have just got up off your, your fanny and just change the channel. But what, what happened to TVs where you turn them on and now you're waiting for software, software update. What am I waiting for? Like all of a sudden it says, well, you have to update your software.Oh, okay. Well, I guess I'm getting all the nuclear launch codes and you know, and then the top of the Norad mountain is going to go up and down when I pressed the different buttons. I just wanted to watch a TV show.Forget the fact there's 3 million channels out there. There's 3 million. Oh, now there's apps on your TV, right? So you can watch a different, I don't know what you call them, a different streaming service or, or, or YouTube or wherever you want.It's like, look, I just want to sit down and maybe watch something for a little bit. And then I don't know about you, but when I pressed the remote, like now, now there's some kind of delay or something. I pressed the button and you've got to wait and you've got to wait.And then you get the spinny circle of death, right? It's thinking, it's thinking, my TV is thinking, why is my TV thinking? I don't want my TV to think. I just want to turn something in and something happens. And you, you know, in, in cars, what happened to cars? What was wrong with cars back in the seventies and eighties? And maybe I guess the nineties, right? You got in a car, you hit your gear shift or you had a something on the floor or you had a manual transmission and now you get in the car and there's binging and there's bells going off and there's things telling you what to do on the dashboard and your doors open, it's not open and your seatbelts on, but it's not on.And, and then, and then they, then they give you a camera. Now, now you have to have a camera because you can't get anywhere with the beeps. Your car has to tell you what's around you and what's behind you and what's under you and what's above you.Like there's like a satellite 10 feet over you. So you better move left cause it's, you know, everything's going to start beeping. And then what drives me mental is that there are so many times when that thing beeps, like it beeps when something's close to your car.And then you look around like the old fashioned way. You turn around, you look, you check all your mirrors and everything and there's nothing there. It was like an invisible butterfly flew by some sensor and it just totally went Kahui, right? So now you can't even, now you can't even move in the car without something going off.And, and all of a sudden things are pinging that aren't even there because the car is smarter than you, right? Everything, there you go. It's like a thinking toaster. Now you're driving a thinking car.And there's no such thing as like stick shifts and gear shifts and manual pedals. There's little knobs. Now I turn a knob and you know, heaven forbid again, if, if your battery's out or something, it's like, well, what do you do? The knob doesn't work.There's no power to the knob to move, to move the car. And you know, and all I want to do is now I want to listen to the radio on the car. Well, you can't really do that because there's satellite and there's USB hookup and there's Bluetooth hookup and there's 30 million hookups.It's like, I would just kind of want to hear a song please. And now they, now they tell us that your car is so smart and electronic that hackers can break into your car and basically drive it for you. So like, like a self-driving car, I can you imagine what would happen all of a sudden? Oh, no one's going to break into that.Well, now you have people as soon as they find out the technology, they're like they're gonna learn how to drive your car with you in it. What happened to the simple little car? I put gas into it. I turn the key.It turned on when I want a radio radio to go on. I just turn the knob up and that I heard a click and that would turn the radio on. And then there's a volume and then you can turn the volume and then you would tune it to what you wanted it to do.So I don't understand who thought it was a good idea to make my car smart. And even, even, even computers today, when you, you know, years ago there was the Radio Shack TRS 80. They're the very basic computers.And what did they do? They played games and you could do some stuff on them, like do math and do some programming and stuff like that. Now, now we have computers that do, I guess, everything. They're, you know, the smallest computer is more powerful than, you know, all of the NASA computers like that.So if you want to launch rockets in space, I guess you can because you're sitting in front of the launch computer apparently. So same thing with computers. Before they were hooked up to the internet and now we think we're so cool cause we've got the internet, but now you've got to be sitting down here.You got to make sure wifi is working so that your computer is hooked up to the internet, unless you have an ethernet cable, in which case you're already on the internet. But if your local provider goes out or if a squirrel gets caught in the, in their system or something, it flashes and explodes that knocks out everything. And then your computer is basically back to nothing.And you just got to sit there and stare at it because all of a sudden you're not getting YouTube. Whereas back in the day, you didn't have an internet or anything like that. So now the computers are so smart, they're stupid.So I, it's my speech is all kind of weird now because I just get a little bit flustered. It's like, I just want things to work when they say they're going to work. When I flick on a white light switch, I want the light to go on.Is that asking too much? When I get my car to drive, I just, I, I have a, I have a vehicle now that when you get in, you can't turn the radio off. It's like on all the time. You can either hit a button and do something else, but it never really turns off.It's like, I never asked for that. Right? Why did you give this to me? I don't want that. And how about a phone? Do you have a phone? Everyone has a phone.When you're growing up, the phone was on the wall or it was on the dining, it was a little table in the dining room. And when somebody called you and somebody was home, they would say, hello, may I speak to Mark? Oh, I'm sorry. Mark's not here.May I take a message? Yes. Please tell him that, uh, Bob called and, um, I'll call him later. Okay.And you had a pad of paper and a pen there and you would take a note and say, okay, Bob called at this time. And okay, cool. Or we got really advanced for a while there.And we had answering machines and answering machines were like, hello, the party you have reached is not here. Please lift to the toe and please leave a message. Right? And you leave a message.No big deal. Now the phone's with us everywhere and you have a heart attack if you, if you can't find it. And not only can you take phone calls with it, but it's another device where I guess you can also launch rockets in space because these phones are now smarter and bigger than anything NASA had years ago.But, but now we can't, we can't drive anywhere without GPS. We can't, you know, see you've got to know things immediately. Do you realize that there was a time that when we, if we didn't know something, we, um, we, we didn't know it.We just said, eh, okay. And now you look stuff up. Well, what is the capital of a typical country? Oh, what's this? Does anybody care? Not really.Are you smarter? I don't know. But now if you get water on your, your phone, you freak out because that's going to fry the whole thing. And the funny part is about all this stuff is that it's so advanced.It's so complicated that if the power goes out, you're screwed, right? It's over. Or they talk about, what is that bomb that just knocks out all the electronics? Can you imagine that day? Can you imagine if some, some hostile foreign country like, um, like New Jersey, you know, they decided to take out all the, the blow up one of those bombs and knocks out the power all over the place. And all of a sudden the cars stop and the computer stop and the, you know, your TV doesn't work and your phones don't work.That's almost gotta be one of the funniest days that could ever be because you can stand around watching people just staring at each other cause they don't know what to do. So I don't, I don't know how things got so complicated and stupid because you know, back in the day, these things had, you had one job, your car was to get you to point A to B and you didn't have to have, you weren't in a traveling NASA computer simulator system. Your TVs just played a few channels because we didn't need 350 channels.We didn't want to watch a, a cooking channel about how to cook beaver feet. And you know, our computers just did basic stuff and they helped us with, you know, I don't know, math and stuff and we got to play games on them. So that was cool.And our phones were phones were just to call people, not to, you know, I don't know, launch more rockets. Maybe we should start launching more rockets with all this stuff. That is until the power goes out.So maybe I'm the only one who just wants things to be a little more simple because it seems like the more complicated and smart they get, the more stupid they get and the more ridiculous they get. And the more time we spend waiting for things to just do what they say they're going to do. It's, it's like having a friend who never, you know, shows up when they say they're going to show up.So I just, I just want my stuff to be simple and not complicated. And I think that's really not asking too