Stones in my shoe

Life's complicated enough as it is, right? So why are these things sent to try us?

• Car radios. They have tiny little buttons that can only be pressed with a jagged fingernail, and knobs with multiple functions; turn them the wrong way and you'll never get your settings back to normal. In winter, you have to take your gloves off to turn the blasted thing on. Forget it; just sing to yourself.
• Ceiling fixtures, flush mount or semi-flush mount. With older fixtures, when you needed to change a light bulb, all you had to do was twist a little knob and remove the glass. Now you need a work crew, a toolkit, and a manual.
• Digital thermometers. I know digital thermometers are safer than the old mercury-and-glass ones, but here's the problem: they run on specialty batteries that you can't find anywhere. The batteries may last for a year or two, but how often do you take your temperature? When the moment comes that you need it, the battery's dead. Then you have to get a new thermometer, but you're too sick to go out.
• Grocery store produce bags. You pull a bag off the roll, then spend the next five minutes trying to open it. Watch people lick their fingers, open the bag, then stick those dirty fingers into the apricots.
• Hard-molded plastic packaging. Everything from batteries to screwdrivers now comes encased in this armour. It takes an assortment of sharp tools to claw your way to the product, leaving a trail of bloodstains. The stuff's not recyclable, either. There's a term for this new misery: wrap rage.
• Laptop and tablet computers. You sit hunched over an itsy-bitsy keyboard, stabbing at the keys, while you twist your neck squinting down into a screen sitting way too low. Whatever happened to ergonomics?
• Page flip formats for digital magazines. It used to be that if you wanted to read a magazine or newspaper online, you viewed it in a PDF file. You could scroll from one page to the next, search for words in the document, and adjust the size of the text. Now it's all getting replaced by page flip format, which creates the illusion of flipping pages over. When you try to zoom in to increase text size, it only lasts until you turn the page; then you have to do it all over again. It's hard to get a reasonable amount of text appearing and staying put on the screen before it slithers away from you.
• Portable credit card readers. You know, the ones they bring to your restaurant table. Let's see, is this a touch screen, do I press the F1 button beside the option, or do I hit one of the keys below the screen? How many seconds go by before the smirking waitperson takes it out of your hands and does it for you?
• Smart phones. My photos are buried down which blind alley? Why am I getting all these charges for services I never requested? Hold on, hold on, I know I've got that contact information in here somewhere.
• TTC seniors' tickets. Bigger and bulkier than ever now; I can hardly cram them into my wallet. They're hard to take apart too; I'm sure I've tossed two of them in without realizing it. Even though you've prepaid, you still have to stand in line to deposit them in front of the ticket collector. You can't pay for them by credit card, even though there's a credit card reader right there. The twenty-first century just can't seem to find its way to the TTC.