I love that I live in a timeline where Dave Barry exists. He’s one of those writers who makes me want to be a better writer.
He published a piece today on modern technology, with classic Dave Barry comedy:
Modern dishwashers — you’ve probably noticed this — take a lonnnggg time to complete a cycle. This is because, in the interest of planetary conservation, modern dishwashers do not use any water. They just make humming sounds for three or four hours, then give up. Basically they’re trying to hum the dirt off your dishes.
An aside: Do I wish Dave weren’t using Substack? Yeah. I really, really do. But I am grateful he’s still writing. Anyway, he wrote about two apps:
…[S]ome people think [technology] moves too fast, and they’re trying to slow things down. For an example of this, we turn to recent stories in the New York Times and USA Today concerning two popular new apps, Roost Social and Carrier Pidge. Both of these apps do essentially the same thing, namely, send texts, but — this is the innovative part — they send them very slowly, by pretending that the texts are being carried by birds, as in olden days. I am not making this up.
It gets more insane.
There’s a small chance that your pigeon will die before it reaches its destination, in which case you have to buy a replacement pigeon for 99 cents. I am still not making this up.
Early on when I first started freelancing for Macworld, I won some good favor with my future colleagues when they asked me to write about a bonkers app called CatPaint, which let you add cats to any photo. In my opening, I included the sentence “There’s a cat for that,” playing off Apple’s App Store slogan of the era.
If I had been writing about Roost Social and Carrier Pidge, I might have used the line “There’s a crap for that.” Listen, I actually genuinely appreciate the creativity and ingenuity in intentionally slow-delivering messages. But, also, this is idiotic. I contain multitudes.