Modern life.

It was by now supposed to be a life of leisure, with robot butlers, flying cars and colonies on the moon.

Instead, it's a Pahoehoe flow of endless tedium in which things that should be easy are needlessly complicated by the state, commercial enterprise or both. Opening a bank account - once a simple task involving very little time and effort now requires ludicrous levels of AML compliance, identity verification, tax documentation etc. Changing a flight should be really easy - but today my wife found that an Air NZ flight in a sequence of flights taking her to and from Manchester had been cancelled, leaving her stuck in Melbourne. Almost two hours of mind-numbingly stupid telephone conversations with Etihad in Australia ("It's not an Etihad flight. Phone Air New Zealand" "but I booked it as part of the sequence with you - they are acting as your carrier" etc) was required in order to end up getting her booked on another flight just 30 minutes later. Why not do that as a default position and then tell the customer what you have done and ask them to call if it does not suit?!

All of this stuff comes down to one thing I believe. We are now personally "empowered" to do everything which has led to expectation that we WANT to do everything ourselves, are capable of doing so and would like nothing better than to spend our time doing things that companies and governments used to employ people to do. It's created thousands of additional tasks for us every year. No wonder we do not feel that we are living our best Jetsons life.

It's a giant version of the loss of secretaries. I used to have a secretary who kept me organised, typed my letters at a ludicrous speed with impressive accuracy and generally kept the plates spinning in the office. I would now be expected to do all of that myself (inefficiently) as well as the actual job for which I am trained and paid.

/rant over.