Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek.
“The world is lost.”
That’s what one driver shouted at another as I walked out of Starbucks this morning.
You see, the second driver had parked diagonally across two spaces. Two disabled spaces, that is.
The first driver’s lament seems, indeed, so accurate.
There are so many manifestations of a lost world these days.
Take all those people on Tuesday who were informed by Amazon that a friend had contributed to their baby registry.
“A gift is on its way,” read the email. This was such a personal notification that it was addressed to “Amazon customer.”
Still, you might think this a delightful gesture. Someone has given you money or bought you a rattle because you’ve decided to have a baby.
It might have been, had any of these people actually signed up for a baby registry, recently had a baby, or even ever contemplated adding to the world’s overcrowding.
Many, it seems, had not.
What a weird way to find out you’re expecting pic.twitter.com/LLphFEl5q7
— Joanna Robinson (@jowrotethis) September 19, 2017
Even then, the email must have been something of a disappointment for those who really were having a baby, really did have a baby registry and then discovered that no one had actually sent them anything at all.
And what are the chances that one or two might have been a touch upset by receiving such an email for one of possibly many personal reasons?
Amazon, though, just blamed a “technical glitch.”
Well, isn’t it always?
We live in a world in which, when things go wrong, it’s a feature, not a bug.
We have to listen to tech companies tell us that if they put a product out there and it doesn’t work, they’ll just keep iterating. While on your nerves they keep grating.
We have to listen to excuses, for example, from the likes of Facebook that they had no idea what Russians may or may not have been doing when they bought ads during the election.
We have to listen to Google and Facebook blame the machines for the fact that you can target ads against “Jew haters” or a million other nasty groupings.
And we have to obey algorithms that try to dictate what we see or don’t see, what we know or don’t know and who we are or aren’t.
The world is, indeed, lost.
It’s still amusing to watch it happen, of course.