Form-Fitting

Even though it is only about three years old, I am aware that every time I take out my flip phone I am opening myself up to ridicule. While people older than me usually don't notice or don't care enough to say anything about, people my own age and younger act as though I just broke out a Morse code machine when I want to send a text. Yet despite this constant scrutiny I am in no hurry to upgrade my phone, for a couple of reasons. The first is that because my phone takes FOREVER to open up something as simple as Twitter I am not constantly looking down at it to check out the latest goings on and I want to keep it that way. Not to get all old-school on you but I really don't like the fact that all people do these days is look at their phones. Don't get me wrong, I am not judging the people who are always on their phones - I can see how seductive they can be - I would just rather not become one of them and figure my best chance to stop that from happening is to not have that power in the first place because knowing my personality I am just as likely as anyone to constantly be online. But the main reason I don't want to upgrade my phone is because of its full keyboard. I can't stand typing on a touch-screen because my fingers were not made to use those things. A lot of people tell me they are fine because even if you screw up the word you were trying to type auto-correct will catch it and correct it, which would be ok is auto-correct always correctly guessed the word people were trying to type, but they only get it right about 70% of the time. Honestly I would rather have my old phone than send an angry text telling a person to "duck off".

However, I have to admit that there is one auto-feature which I do not think gets nearly enough praise - auto-fill. This is the program which records all the information you had previously entered when in a similar situation and keeps the answers around for the next form you have to fill out. This means that rather than having to enter your mailing address in three different spots all you have to do is press the first number of your street address and the rest of the spots get filled in automatically. It is a huge time saver but, more importantly to a guy like me who hates repetition, it stops the monotony. (And yes, it aids the companies because people are more likely to join contests and give out their personal information if the form takes 20 seconds to fill out instead of 20 minutes. I can live with that.) The bigger problem is that not every form has a place for you to fill them out online, because some people still want hard copies of things. I have been acutely aware of this lately because it feels as though I have been on a form-fill spree. Part of it has to do with Christmas having just occurred because the new thing is to register all your devices for a warranty, which means filling out a form. The other reason is that my health insurance just got upgraded (thanks, Obama!) and I had to decide which new features I wanted to add on my plan. Lastly, I am getting a new passport for an upcoming trip, which means filling out government forms. All of it amounts to writing my name a few dozen times which is enough to make me suddenly turn into one of those people wondering why these companies won't join this century and are stuck in an era where people still use pens.

Look, I am not expecting filling out a long form to be exciting, I just don't know why some of these particular questions are necessary. For example, on my passport application it asked for the name of a contact I would not be travelling with. Now, I provided it but who is to say I won't be travelling with them next time, at which point your data become useless. That question feels more gossipy than helpful. There is a line between relevant information and just being nosy and most of the time it feels like these forms can't tell the different. Also, exactly how many different ways am I expect to answer the same question? On my health insurance form it asked me if I was pregnant roughly 200 times and I had to check no every time. Shouldn't once be enough? (Hell, I'll even grant you two for a "You sure?" follow-up.) The problem is that if you thought I was impatient about forms before, you should see me now that I have become accustomed to auto-fill. The simple act of repeatedly writing out my name and address has become quite torturous, the consequence of which is that I want to get through the rest of the form as possible, which has resulted in more than a few occasions where I couldn't be bothered to read things all the way through, assuming I knew what answers were supposed to go on which line or space. As it turns out, I have a very different opinion about that from the people who design forms for a living. Normally I pride myself on accuracy but on at least three forms in the past week I have written my name on the part of the form which says "To be filled out by official". That's an obvious whoops but if you think I am started an entire form over simply because I wrote my full name where it just asked for my last name you are crazy.

Now, I am hardly the first person to do this and I won't be the last so I am not really expecting any major fall-out from my ill-placed signature (although I would be the guy whose passport gets rejected because he signed his name in the wrong spot) but at the same time it is kind of embarrassing because it makes me look as though I am incapable of following direction. Admittedly, that is exactly what is happening in this situation but that is not how it normally works and I don't want the people who ultimately receive these forms to think less of me. (It doesn't matter that we will never meet - it's the principle of the thing.) That is why going forward I need to make sure I nip this particular problem in the bud. That's not just because I value my reputation as an editor but because it is a really bad idea to sign something without thoroughly reading everything through and knowing exactly what you are putting your signature on. Still, the people whose job it is to create these forms could help me out a little by not making them quite so long and tedious. How about breaking up the format a little? Nothing radical - just not asking for things in the exact same order as you have since the dawn of time. Sure, there would be plenty of people out there who don't like change for change's sake and the first few are going to be riddled with errors but after word about the new look gets out I bet most people would bear down, concentrate a lot more and that would cut down on the mistakes in the long run. Anything has to be better than the current system, which everyone would agree is ducking annoying.