Sophisticated-trash - Unbetitelt

You’re immortal and have passed the ‘hero’ phase centuries ago. You enter a small corner shop one day to find it is owned by your millennia-old arch-nemesis. You really, really need milk though.

Humans finally broke physics by travelling faster than light in an experimental spaceship. 8 alien civilizations visited earth to issue a speeding ticket and 3 more sent strongly worded letters about safety in their school zones.

Today I was forced to do internet banking for the first time in like four years (sad) and they’ve put in a bunch of new security shit I don’t understand and all my info like my phone number and stuff was out of date, so I had to physically go into the branch and actually ask the teller “can you please help me do internet banking” like I’m some doddering old dear who doesn’t understand this newfangled World Wide Web thing and IT GETS WORSE, because they’re like ‘okay so the easiest way to deal with our security is if you have our app on your phone’ and I DO NOT WANT apps on my phone and I grumble about this in the most Old Man Way possible but they say it’s the easiest so fine, we can do that, only there’s an in-bank security step for authenticating the app so the lady helping me has to sit down and wait while I pull out my old scratched beaten-up dinosaur of a Barely Counts As A Smartphone, wait forever for it to wake up, and open the app store.

I do not know where the app store is.

Okay, this lady explains to me (she is very good at customer service and there’s absolutely no sign on her face that she is baffled how someone like me can even be alive, even though logically she HAS TO be thinking that), it should be in your apps. Look at your apps.

I do not know how to look at my apps. I use like 4 apps (call, text, photos, music) and I put them on the front screen thing ages ago. I push all of the buttons on the phone and apps do not appear. There’s nothing in settings or anything either.

Try swiping up, she says.

I try this a few times. My phone does not register the contact. On the fourth time, it realises that I want it to do something, and oh, there are the apps. We install the app. We do all the sign-in and authentification code shit and it does not work. We do it again and it does not work again.

“If I had a checkbook I’d be out of here by now,” I say. She laughs because it is true. We’ve been here for twenty minutes. I restart my phone to see if that’s the problem and grumble under my breath about how banking never used to be so complicated. As I open the app again, I ask how people do internet banking if they don’t have phones.

She seems puzzled by the question. “We have ways for them to do banking,” she says, “but most… most people have phones.”

She’s probably right. You probably need a phone to survive if you’re homeless these days.

The program loads now but catches us in an endless sign-in loop and the problem, we learn from a supervisor who’s wandered over (presumably to see how helping one idiot put an app on their phone could possibly be taking so long) is actually not on my end. There’s something wrong with the version of the app that the woman assisting me has put on my account on the computer (that’s her half in this operation), so we have to uninstall the app on both systems and reinstall it. Fine. I uninstall the app. Now to go to the app store.

I have forgotten how to access the app store. I push all of the buttons on the phone and apps do not appear. There’s nothing in settings or anything either.

Try swiping up, the woman says.

Oh. There’s the app store.

We install it and get caught in an endless loop again but I am computer savvy enough to know that if restarting and reinstalling doesn’t work then sometimes just trying the same thing over and over again will make it work for no reason, and it does, after I sign in three times in a row we can FINALLY authenticate the app and I can FINALLY use it for two-factor authentication and I CAN FINALLY DO INTERNET BANKING AGAIN.

“Thanks for your help,” I say.

“No problem.”

“I’m sorry it took so long,” I say.

“It’s really not a problem,” she says, and because she’s a professional it’s totally convincing, but I have helped people with tech before and I know how much it sucks. I look at this woman who, on any other day, would be a good few years older than me, but not today. For today, I am a doddering 96-year-old woman who wishes for a simple chequebook and does not like smartphones.

I get up, and I pick up my bag and my walking stick, and I leave the bank, thinking about the scarf I’ve been knitting and how much more work I have to do on it. I wonder if I should bake scones tonight.

I have already forgotten how to open the app store.

Clint: Just remember; what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Natasha: What didn’t kill me should have tried harder.

Clint: Natasha!

Natasha: What?! I’d appreciate a little follow through once in a while..

Clint: You’re never going to let that go, are you?

Natasha: ...Even you couldn’t kill me when you had the chance.

Clint (contemplation shows in his face as his eyes coming to rest on one of the hospital pillows): ...

Natasha: Do it you coward.

Bucky: you used to wear newspapers in your shoes Steve: *heart eyes* can’t read that in a museum Sam: seriously?? right in front of my salad???

Gordon Ramsay asked a contestant who was trying out for MasterChef if he had a girlfriend and he goes “No, I’m actually gay” and without missing a beat Gordon asks “Boyfriend?”. Turns out the contestant was single and then he started talking about how he came out to his dad before coming audition for the show because he didn’t want to hide his true self and Gordon responded “You’ve got no reason to either” and this is just another reason why Gordon Ramsay is amazing.

Everyone can do magic. Everyone except you, that is. Your aunt and uncle have always made fun of you for not being able to do magic, until one day you received a letter inviting you to a school of “science”, and you discovered a secret society of people who make great things without magic.