A Vengeance Prayer to the Tech Gods

Is it me or have the Tech Gods taken to hiding the things we need to use their stuff in not-so-plain-sight? For example 

1. Apple thought it a good idea - after an upgrade - to make the lock screen clock display on my iPhone and iPad virtually invisible with their new liquid bubble unreadable display and then move all the settings that enable me to make it solid and readable again 

2. Paypal changed the menu choices I am presented with depending on my entry point, browser or device so I keep getting lost on their site

3. Microsoft made it very difficult for me to download their software onto a new computer without buying a new subscription - I have a family subscription already, I don't want to have to get another, there were no options for existing subscription holders 

4. Blogger made me clear my cookies yet again before photos would upload. 

5. Apple (yes, you again) have changed the place to clear cookies in Safari and the way you do that now. In fact I still have no idea how to delete individual cookies, I had erase all my web data to get rid of them. And whilst I'm on an Apple rant, I thought my camera icon had disappeared until it dawned on me that the black round thing is not a new on-line pool or snooker game, it is supposed to be a camera lens .... thanks very much, it's all so much clearer now (not!)

6. Messenger's blue "Send" button appearing and disappearing randomly. Several times recently, the button hasn't appeared. I select a photograph in a message and ... poof! It's gone, how the heck do I send this? I try again, still not there ... on the third go, it re-appears, sitting there as smug as a cat that's just been fed, making out it's always been there. Meta gaslighting its users - this happens far too frequently and don't try to tell me I must've missed it - I am not imaging this! 

7. BBC's i-Player's sound settings are so much louder than the normal TV, we're always having to adjust it down 

8. LG's black buttons on black devices - I can go along with the black buttons that have white numbers on them but note the Volume + and - slider has raised black symbols, I can't feel them and I can't see them in anything except extremely bright daylight, why couldn't they also be white? We mostly watch TV in the evenings - in low light conditions - we have to turn the big light on in order to alter the volume!

9. When MTM exchanged his Samsung phone for a newer model, it looked virtually identical to his old one so he had high hopes it would operate similarly. But no, the Volume and On/Off buttons on the side of it have been transposed for some reason. Out of sheer habit, he is forever accidentally turning it off when he just wanted to alter the volume. Why-oh-why change this? It just seems to be change for change's sake, someone justifying their huge design fee? 

10. Scroll bars have been sacrificed for the sake of a "clean look" on virtually all the Tech interfaces I have been using recently. I have lost count of the times I have assumed there are no more settings because a dialogue box hasn't got a scroll bar. Scroll bars are sometimes still there, they're just incognito now; you have to intuit that there may be one and click in an ever-narrowing area to get to see the rest of a box or page that might - or might not - exist. I now call them Schrödinger's scroll bars 

The way I find the setting I need seems to involve me putting myself in their shoes "Now, if I were a programmer looking to put this in the hardest possible place to find it, where should it be?" 

This then - my Vengeance Prayer - is for all the errant Tech Gods who have inconvenienced me and robbed me of hours of my time whilst I try to figure out their impenetrable thought processes: 

• May their phone unlock with Face ID only after the third try ... every. single. time. 
• May their AirPods connect instantly ... to the wrong device. 
• May their bin collection be missed, but only when the bin is absolutely full. 
• May every USB plug require three attempts despite being symmetrical. 
• May their screen brightness auto-adjust just after they’ve got it just right. 
• May passwords that “definitely worked yesterday” suddenly … not. 
• May all their loading spinners pause at 99% long enough to raise hope, then despair. 
• May their tea go cold whilst scrabbling about in drawers trying to find a teaspoon 
• May their on-line shopping packages be delivered to the one neighbour who has gone away for the weekend 
• May the batteries in their remote give out just when they've settled down to watch the finale of a series they've been looking forward to seeing all week. 
• May their one working biro disappear when there's a vital document to sign
• May they be forever trapped in the state of thinking "I'm sure this used to be easier"