I continue to urge you, dear reader, to meat-ax your notifications. It’s a very good bet that you simply don’t need your phone to bother you as often as it does, and that you’ll be happier with most notifications turned off.

That said, notifications can occasionally provide a good laugh. Recently, I noticed a badge on the icon for the “My Verizon” app. I was curious what this could be about. I logged in to the app, and navigated to the messages area:

Well gosh, that sounds important! Is there some problem with my account? Perhaps my auto-payment method expired or is otherwise invalid? Don’t keep me in suspense, Verizon. What is the urgent message you have for me?

¡Ay, dios mio! And that, my friends, is how Verizon lost the ability to ever badge its app icon again.

Recently, friend-of-the-site Kim B. received a rather shocking notification on her phone. There’s really no two ways about it – she was being advised to Netflix and chill:

That is quite the suggestion, particularly to someone in a committed relationship.

It’s also just a very bad notification. Who the hell is sitting around, wondering what to watch, and unable to find anything on their own? Are there actually people who need their phones to direct them, unprompted, with notifications about how they should spend their leisure time?¹

Even if such a prompt really is useful enough, to enough people, Netflix should at least put some quotes around the title. After they’ve done that, maybe they can spend a little time writing a blocklist for content that shouldn’t be suggested. Yikes.

When I asked Kim if I could share this, she immediately approved. However, she was sad with how I’d cropped things. As seen above, the phone’s background featuring her delightful dog Eva is not properly visible. Looking again, I realized a larger view would serve us well as a closing. Eva’s seemingly disdainful expression strikes me as a rather perfect response to this ridiculousness:

You said it, dog.

Footnotes:

1. Years back, I turned off nearly all notifications and badges on my phone, and I highly recommend it. I let texts through, along with emails from VIPs and a tiny number of other things. For everything else, I’ll get to it when I get to it. I strongly encourage everyone to give it a try. It’s a vastly better way to live your life. ↩︎

Last week, I wrote about the USPS not being good at email. More recently, I ran into a similarly poor notification from sandwich-maker Jimmy John’s:

We’ll set aside the rude instruction to “Come & Get it!”, because that’s in line with Jimmy John’s slightly odd brand. Note the times for these two messages, however. I placed the order at 6:08 PM, and I was told it was ready for pickup at 9:18 PM. That is not exactly “freaky fast”, nor any kind of fast at all.

Fortunately, this order did not in fact take 3 hours and 10 minutes to make. I picked it up around 6:20 PM, and I was enjoying it at home a few minutes later. In fact, when I received this notification, I thought “I just ate my sandwich, and it’s in my stomach right now”.

I don’t know if this was another slow computer server, or if someone simply forgot to tap the “Order Ready” button on the screen. Alternately, it’s also possible an entire second order was prepared, and that an identical copy of my sandwich sat there, lonely and unloved. That might be the saddest possibility of all.

Here’s what the bottom of Facebook’s notifications page says:

Here’s what the bottom of Facebook’s notifications page should say: