OLD PEOPLE BEWARE. The day may come where you will have to purchase a new television or new car. Then, if you’re not a technology wonk, expect to have your world turned upside down and lose tufts of precious hair above each ear from the grasping and the pulling. I’ve written about my new television woes already. Let me recap and augment because now that I’ve also bought a new car, I see there is a thread, a portentous pattern emerging. I see the bigger life picture.
Here it is: From now on, everything designed to simplify our lives is going to become more complicated.

All we seem to have left in the world of technology to sell more products is the inclusion of more and more gewgaws to what used to be simple devices. The older we are, the more annoying that is going to become. I’m at annoyance level 7 currently.

We now have the ability to turn on our toaster from another state. We can toggle our porch lights from Yosemite Park. We can ask our car to parallel park itself. We can change channels on our TVs by waving our hand. If only they could teach my cat to talk, so he could say “Let me out before I do something on the floor that we’ll both regret,” we might have something integral rather than incidental.

At least, that’s been my experience, and I’m a tech wonk myself. What I thought would be a few simple life upgrades turned into an exercise in ulcer suppression.

As I wrote before, our old $1,600 Sony Trinitron 800-pound non-HD television worked wonderfully for many, many years, but finally the seduction of the new, flat-screen, wall-mounted models and the saved living room floor space got the best of us; that, along with slow DSL and the constant chiding of our children and grandchildren, pushed us over the brink into the abyss. Now I have sunburned patches above my ears where the hair is gone.

My stairway to madness: With the TV we reached a point, after two full days of troubleshooting and long, ear-bruising phone calls, where both Comcast and Vizio said, “From tests at our end, our products are working perfectly in your home.” The problem was, my Vizio couldn’t find my Comcast and vice versa, and it never did.

I had to take the Vizio back and buy Samsung for $1,000! It connects, but drops the signal 2-3 times per movie rental, and the weak volume sometimes vanishes completely and we have to turn the set off and on to restore the sound. It sucks, basically. The good thing: I’m watching far less television.

Then we bought a new Highlander last month. Oh, joy. We should have purchased a jalopy. The console looks like the cockpit of a jumbo jetliner. No longer can I simply turn on the radio and hold down a button to lock in a channel. I have to run setups on a touch screen.

The volume control only works for the radio, not for the GPS lady. She whispers to my deafness and has a separate volume control that we couldn’t find in the manual.

We were lost in the Nevada desert over the holidays trying to find an address. Every time we typed in the street, it took us to Fairfield CA and said “There is no such street.” The damn GPS had no idea where we were.

When we finally figured that out, parked along Highway 395, I couldn’t hear the woman’s voice. I turned up the volume dial and it had no effect. “What the … ?”

The 300-page manual was useless. It had no index to find “Change GPS volume.” I had to call Toyota in Fairfield and be put on hold for 10 minutes. I finally got the simple directions. Go to SetUp, select GPS, then select Navigate, then select Audio, then select Volume, then select from a dropdown menu. If she’s too loud you simply go to SetUp, select GPS, then select Navigate, then select Audio, then select Volume, then select from a dropdown menu. Gosh, life is simple.

In that 300-page manual there are three or four different diagrams for various Toyota consoles. Funny. None of them look like ours. Instructions tell us to push buttons we don’t have. We figured we got the wrong manual, but Toyota said, “From tests at our end, our products are working perfectly in your car.”

One day I tried to play Pandora. It’s something I used to do with one tap. Four hours later, parked once again on the side of the road, I called the Toyota dealership.

“I’m doing everything in the manual and I can’t get online. Pandora still doesn’t work.”

He said, “Did you plug your phone into the car with a USB cable?”

“Eh, no,” I said. “Why in the world would I do that?”

“That’s how you get to the Internet.”

“But I have Bluetooth. Why isn’t it wireless?”

“Bluetooth is only for phone calls. For Internet you must be hardwired.”

“Why doesn’t it tell me that in the manual?”

“Who knows,” he said.

I plugged in the cable and it still didn’t work. I called the dealership again. He asked, “Did you download the special Toyota synchronizing app to your phone and sign up and create a login and password and open an account?”

“Eh, no. I just want to listen to music.”

After another hour of installing apps and joining and syncing I got to hear a bit of Leadbelly. He’d have rolled over in his grave onto his 12-string guitar if he knew how hard I had to work to get to the Rock Island Line.

Steve Gibbs teaches at Benicia High School and has written a column for The Herald since 1985.