35 As Useless As Jokes: The Tech Edition

Technology has quietly become the richest source of useless objects since the Victorians started patenting things. Every drawer in the country contains a cable that fits nothing and a remote for a television that left the house years ago. The comparisons write themselves; all anybody has to do is open the drawer.

Thirty-five below, weighted towards the ones that will still make sense in ten years. Fashionable jokes about specific apps age badly. A cable that is two inches short is eternal.

Table of Contents

Thirty-five from the drawer of doom

As useless as a laptop with no ports.
As useless as a stylus for a phone with no screen.
As useless as a smart bulb when the wifi is down.
As useless as a smart lock with a flat battery.
As useless as a fitness watch on a sofa.
As useless as a cable that is two inches short.
As useless as a charger for a device discontinued in 2011.
As useless as a printer driver from a dead website.
As useless as a scanner with the lid missing.
As useless as a fax machine with a modern number.
As useless as a floppy disk with the shutter torn off.
As useless as a CD tray on a laptop with no CDs left in the house.
As useless as a spare remote with no back.
As useless as a universal remote that knows one television.
As useless as a keyboard with no vowels.
As useless as a mouse with the ball taken out.
As useless as a trackpad in gloves.

As useless as a touchscreen in the rain.
As useless as a fingerprint reader with wet hands.
As useless as face unlock in the dark.
As useless as a password hint that says the usual one.
As useless as two-factor codes sent to a lost phone.
As useless as a backup nobody has ever restored.
As useless as a cloud folder with no signal.
As useless as a loading bar that has been at ninety-nine per cent for an hour.
As useless as a progress bar that goes backwards.
As useless as an error message that says Error.
As useless as a help page that links to itself.
As useless as a chatbot with two answers.
As useless as an unsubscribe link that subscribes you.
As useless as a cookie banner with one button.
As useless as a speaker with the volume soldered at three.
As useless as noise-cancelling headphones in a quiet room.
As useless as a screen protector applied with four bubbles and a hair.
As useless as an update that removes the feature you use.

Using them without becoming the IT person at a party

Keep them short and do not explain the technology. The joke in “an error message that says Error” dies the moment somebody starts describing the software it came from. Everyone has met a machine that refused to say what was wrong; that shared memory is doing all the work, and it needs about four seconds, not a paragraph.

If you liked the register, the weirdly specific thirty is the closest neighbour, and the office edition covers the printer in more detail than anybody asked for.