I found one thing that our robot overlords cannot do…

by philg

… print labels from Google Contacts.

(It doesn’t seem to be all that easy from Microsoft Outlook either, requiring a “mail merge” operation.)

We would expect even the least experienced human assistant to learn that every December it is time to print contact addresses onto labels so that they can be placed on Christmas cards. How are computers supposed to take our jobs if they can’t handle the seemingly simplest tasks?

7 thoughts on “I found one thing that our robot overlords cannot do…”

  1. Google Contacts seems to be an abysmally terrible program.

    Over at HackerNews they were describing how Google loves to hire computer scientists, and hates hiring mere software engineers, people who know how to write good, sophisticated applications that fill the hole the user has.

    Google’s software is shit all up and down their stack. They should reconsider who they hire and why.

  4. the good news is that there is a “create label” button in google contacts.

    the bad news is that it only allows you to put a label on contact, but not the other way around 🙂

  5. Jerry, Google’s software prints billions of dollars. In fact it so much, that they literally don’t know what to do with it. Who cares about labels?

  6. There’s a reason why Dymo can charge an arm and a leg for 1980s thermal label printer technology when you can get an all-in-one color inkjet printer for under $40. Secretaries would do anything to avoid dealing with printing envelopes or deal with mail merge software that hasn’t evolved since VisiCalc.

  7. I think we’ll be safe from the overlords, at least thru 2018 …

    for some reason I just did a cut-n-paste of Quincy, Massachusetts into Google Maps. My Mac Chrome is running a little slow, maybe due to ~200 tabs open. So I ended up with “Your LocationQuincy, Massachusetts” which Google Maps couldn’t find.

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