THINKING OUT LOUD: Button overload has become a pressing issue

Published 6:00 am Friday, June 16, 2023

I’m tired of buttons.

I realized this the other day when I told a website that, indeed, I was not a robot. Someday soon, advances in artificial intelligence (you can call it AI) will render proving your humanity useless.

AI will be able see which squares have a truck in them and convince websites that they click, therefore they exist.

Until that day, we click buttons. Scores and scores of them, every day for seemingly every purpose.

My fingers hurt.

Not all of them, mind you, for I’ve never been more than an extremely fast hunt-and-pecker. Besides, they want to convince you that you’re not typing on buttons, but rather keys.

Don’t believe them. Modern “keyboards” are nothing more than rows of buttons. “Keys” should only be mentioned when referring to actual typewriters, doors … and pianos.

And cars, of course. My housemate (no, not the cat) drives a vehicle that not only require a key to start the ignition, it has button-less crank windows.

I’m so jealous.

The instrument I’m using at this very moment — the keyboard, not a piano — has six rows and 78 buttons. I sometimes have to hit two or three of them at once to get the desire result.

It is maddening.

And that doesn’t even include the mouse which, while technically not having any buttons, still needs you to click it … sometimes twice.

Click, click click. All day long.

I once worked with a newsroom assistant who was very exacting about how many buttons needed to be clicked to perform each of her tasks — to the point where, when they went on vacation, they left very specific instructions:

We were told to double-click on some such thing and warned that not to “click once then pause and click again. Click twice without pausing.”

Pause.

I wish it were possible to give up these buttons as easily as I’ve given up shirt buttons.

I wear pullovers almost exclusively these days. It’s a style choice, a fashion choice, but one that acknowledges defeat to the battle of the bulge that makes enlisting button-down shirts a noble, but ultimately lost, cause.

Tech buttons haven’t gone out of fashion, but they do break down.

The down-scrolling arrow button on my laptop has given up the ghost, so I have two choices — use a mouse, or click to make an internal keyboard show up on the screen and then click the down arrow on that.

I’ve decided that there can’t possibly be anything worthwhile below what I’m able to see on the screen, so I’m not going there.

I believe I’ve clicked and scrolled and pressed so often since since buttons took over our lives that my fingerprints have changed. I might still be a human, but maybe not the same one I was before I began playing Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major on a keyboard that is 10 keys short of a piano.

Meanwhile, there’s the remote control for the television. Well, the remote controls. There are two of them, each of which has 57 buttons — two-thirds (at least) of which have never been pressed.

The only difference between the remotes is that one is embossed on the bottom with a word rhyming with “Rectum” and the other with a word rhyming with “Farter.”

Actually, that’s not the only difference. The buttons on the older one have worn down to the extent that the only one that still works regularly is the Volume.

It’s a pain in the rectum.

Why not send the old remote to a nice farm upstate? Glad you asked. The answer is because we’ve never been able to program the newer one so that the volume works on the TV.

Doing so — based our layman’s interpretation of the instruction sheet — requires completing 10 steps that require 17 buttons to be pressed, including a couple of times waiting for indicator lights to flash either once or twice.

This is only after finding the specific code we need to control the remote control for our brand of television. This can require seven steps pressing as many as 34 buttons.

This past weekend we had houseguests — one of whom was a musician who spent years working in high-tech as an engineer or programmer or programming engineer or some such thing who said he’d gladly program the new remote to fix the sound issue for us.

He gave up after 10 minutes. We brought him to Rooster’s for a cinnamon roll the next morning to apologize for his headache.