Why I hate WhatsApp

‘My phone says I can’t go out until Tuesday, so I can’t come and meet you,’ said my friend. And she repeated this down the line several times, as I insisted I did not understand.

I had nipped outside the hairdresser with my hair in highlighter foils to take her call and was standing on the street, phone tucked under the silver-paper flaps, a stiff wind blowing. I assumed she must be saying something else and I had misheard.

‘It’s the app on my phone,’ she explained. ‘I’ve counted the days myself and I should be able to go out today, but my phone says I have to stay in for another day, so I’ll do that.’

I get that she was isolating after contracting Covid, even though she was double vaccinated, but that’s another story. What I didn’t understand was how an app could count better than she could.

I haven’t ever downloaded any apps. Something told me, when the app thing started, that madness lurked in the promise ‘Just download the app’.

When I think of the institutions insisting that I ‘just download the app’ — banks, Facebook, the NHS Test and Trace — I wonder just why these masters of manipulation want me to just download the app.

A friend of mine in her sixties was fumbling about on her phone the other night trying to transfer money to me for half a curry takeaway for four at her house. She squinted into the screen, pulling her reading glasses this way and that, murmuring, ‘Oh no, wait, that’s not it, hang on…’

She didn’t have any cash, either in her purse or anywhere in the house, being convinced that all she ever had to do regarding money now was poke her phone.