Petty Gripes, The Guardian calls its series of light-hearted features on elements of modern life that involve minorly annoying things. Things like bands that name themselves after other bands or being irritated by somebody else’s coffee snobbery. You know, little quirks.

In one recent article, a software update in a writer’s phone meant that his maps app would no longer talk to his car’s infotainment system. Automatic software updates duly went down as another petty gripe.

I wish my patience and tolerance could mean that software updates – or software glitches in general, for that matter – could be deemed merely petty gripes.

On the list of gripes I have, automatic updates, apparently for my benefit but which rarely feel it, are right up there in the pantheon of mighty annoyances – along with the worst of them, the ones about which I’m too cross to mention.

A petty gripe, for me, is the way the film never tears cleanly from the corner of a packet of bacon or the chafing the back of my thumb gets when I slide my feet into my trainers.

Whereas if my phone has decided that today it won’t pair with a car’s audio system, or if a car’s touchscreen crashes when it was fine yesterday, or – and let’s broaden this out to software complaints in general – a driver assistance system tugs at the steering wheel, hauls on the brakes or beeps at me unnecessarily, these are more than petty gripes. I probably never get quite so furious. I think it’s because of the futility of it all. 

When these things go wrong, there’s literally nothing you can do, save for turn it off and on again and hope. Whereas I can slide a knife down the side of a packet of bacon or I could use a shoehorn if my thumb really hurt. And if a piece of hardware fails in my car, I can at least see what has happened and plan a way to fix it.

Punctures are annoying, because usually they’re down to someone else’s carelessness with screws or road maintenance. But I’ve had cars and motorbikes with broken springs or injectors or cracked exhausts, and I don’t mind that they’ve failed at all, because things just wear out; I can see they’re broken.

But when it comes to software failing, sometimes apparently through age, sometimes through updates, sometimes through being terrible in the first place, I can’t plan a fix; I’m just left helpless.

As a result, I’ve wanted to throw the products they’re running from tall buildings; to break them into thousands of tiny shards and scatter them across the bedroom floors of their creators in the middle of the night, then set off their smoke alarms.

Recently a Bluetooth speaker induced in me such a rage when it refused to pair with my phone that I’m actually embarrassed about it. But I just wanted to listen to the radio on a Saturday afternoon, and that was literally its only job. I didn’t want it to fly me to Saturn.