Why I Hate Technology

Before everyone starts telling me how technology has made life easier, hear me out.

I’m trying to enclose my back deck, so I jumped on Lowe’s website to order the materials. Everything seemed simple enough. I selected delivery, and the website proudly announced that if I completed my order before 2:00 PM, I qualified for same-day delivery.

Perfect.

I placed the order around 12:30 PM.

A few minutes later, the confirmation email arrived… and that’s when the fun began.

The shipping address was wrong.

Not my fault, either. My billing address and shipping address in my account are both correct. Somehow, Lowe’s system decided to take my correct street address and randomly attach the wrong city and state to it.

No big deal, right? Surely I can edit it online.

Nope.

After several failed attempts, I called the store. After fighting my way through the automated prompts, I finally reached someone in shipping. I explained the issue, and she assured me it would be corrected.

An hour later, I checked the tracking. Still wrong.

So I tried the online chat. No luck.

At this point, I called again.

This time I spoke slowly. I spelled everything. I repeated every detail. The representative read the address back to me perfectly.

Success… or so I thought.

A few minutes later I checked again.

Wrong. Again.

By now it’s pushing 6:00 PM, and the same-day delivery I was promised has come and gone. I have no idea if my order will show up, get delivered to the wrong place, or be canceled altogether. Only thing I do know, I was 100% charges for the delivery and materials.

And that’s when it hit me. This isn’t really about my lumber.

It’s about what we’ve become.

This is a Lowe’s store in my own town. The delivery drivers know these streets. They know the neighborhoods. They know where they’re going.

So why can’t someone simply load the truck, pick up the phone, call me, and say, “Hey Pete, just confirming your address before we head your way.”

Problem solved.

Instead, everyone is trapped inside a computer system that refuses to cooperate. The employees can’t override it. The website can’t fix it. The chat can’t understand it. The technology that was supposed to make everything easier has become the very thing preventing a simple solution.

We’ve become so dependent on technology that when it fails, people don’t know how to work around it anymore. And this is how stores waste money! Employees standing around doing nothing when technology fails the consumer.

Common sense has been replaced with computer prompts. Real conversations have been replaced with automated menus.

Problem-solving has been replaced with, “I’m sorry, the system won’t let me.”

Here’s the ironic part: the people I spoke with were trying to help. They weren’t the problem.

The problem was that the technology had all the control.

We’ve reached a point where good employees are made to look incompetent because they’re handcuffed by software. Great customer service gets buried under layers of automation. And when the computer makes a mistake, everyone just waits for the computer to fix… the mistake the computer created.

Technology is an incredible tool. But it’s a terrible boss. When computers replace common sense instead of supporting it, everybody loses.

So here I sit, waiting to see if my order ever arrives, wondering if somewhere inside a server there’s a computer convinced my house magically moved to another state.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll get my lumber.

Or maybe I’ll just get another email telling me everything is “on schedule.”

Because apparently that’s what progress looks like. Like running my own business, I often wonder if that one employee will step up and take care of all the problems!