Send me a goddamn email

On the devilish experience of online portals.

Corridor in the Asylum

Have you ever seen ticks clustered in the ear of a horse? There’s no horror like it. Repulsive little arachnids, stuck like shellfish, sucking the horse’s blood; but worse, the total acquiescence of the horse: that regal animal standing on four tall legs, chewing grass with quiet resignation as parasites drain her life.

Except I’m wrong, there’s a horror just like it: the experience of being prompted by some organisation to sign up for yet another online portal—and finding yourself, with total acquiescence, doing exactly what you’re told.

Do you know what I mean? To make an appointment with my GP or receive results from a blood test, I need to log in to a website called “ManageMyHealth”. To look at photos of my toddler taken by her daycare teachers, I need to wrangle a portal called “Educa”. For important body-corp updates concerning the apartment building where I live, it’s the perennially busted and glitchy “MyCommunity”. This is the cluster of ticks in my ear, you no doubt have your own.

Ugly, bad, spirit-sapping, pain in the arse

A portal is meant to be a passageway, and this is the tech metaphor: these websites are places you pass through to get where you really want to be, which is gazing upon an image of your young daughter’s face, shrieking with laughter as she chases her friends around a playground, or reading test results that confirm you’re HIV negative. But the overwhelming feeling using the portals is that they get you nowhere; that you’re stuck.

For a start, there’s the time it takes. On a good day, it might only be a few minutes of pure irritation: tap on the email icon, tap to open the email, tap the portal link, tap, tap, tap, ahhhhh. There it is. My baby. My lack of AIDS.

But on a bad day? Tap, tap, tap. Shit, forgot my password. Tap the “forgot password” button. Forgot the username too. Tap the recovery button, revert to email, tap around to find the reset link—it’s not here? Is it in ‘Spam’? Generate another one. You know the drill. On a bad day you might waste 21 minutes of your allegedly wild and precious life trudging through online interfaces in pursuit of an image of your daughter. You could have driven down the road and clapped eyes on her actual, snot-nosed face, then driven all the way home again, feeling two-fifths as fucked off as you are now.

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That these “convenience services” make everything worse is obvious to everyone involved. Why do we use them? I am currently embroiled in a slow-burn, passive-aggressive dispute with my GP, who won’t order a test I think I need. If I phone for a physical appointment, she’s not available for two weeks, but if I message her on the portal, she replies within the hour. Her obstinate messages beget ticked-off replies, and we go back and forth like this for days. Is this optimal medicine? Is this how we should be spending our lives? Are we going anywhere?

I feel like we’re on the precipice. The internet is now so confusing and bad it’s unusable for almost everyone. It cannot be long until we return to real life: medical advice and test results discussed in person. Body corp information on the notice board. Verbal updates on your snot-nosed cherub at pickup time.

But in the meantime, stuck in the bowels of yet another portal, I find myself wishing for a monstrous compromise: couldn’t this have been an email?