I am afraid of the Machine. Expose me to banner ads or anticipatory marketing, and I am instantly reminded of the inexorable rise of the android; hand me a pair of Google Glass, and I am convinced that “RoboCop” was a documentary.

The 19th century saw the advent of radar, the assembly line, fiber optics and plastic; this century we’ve created apps that tell you who in your neighborhood would be willing to have sex with you.

Yet, loath though this frequent emailer and social media enthusiast is to lead a life in thrall to algorithms and bots, I admit that having Scrabble on my iPhone has improved my life immeasurably. Indeed, in my dotage, it’s entirely possible that I’ll now look back on the accumulated years I’ve spent on subway platforms and airport tarmacs as the good years, the salad years.

So, if Scrabble can light up the dark alleys of my time on earth, maybe other apps can, too? The market research company Forrester Research predicted in 2011 that annual revenue from the purchase of apps would reach $38 billion in 2015, a figure so large as to inspire curiosity in even the most techno-churlish.

I recently spent three weeks trying to improve my life through apps. First, I diagnosed myself; I determined that I have bodily ills, household ills and wardrobe ills. Then I started Googling.

Lo, my bodily ills. The cold weather has slowed my commitment to swimming and walking; my current love handles give my mid-torso the silhouette of a rotary telephone. So for $2.99 I bought Meal Snap: You photograph food, and Meal Snap coughs up a calorie count.

Maybe this will inject my snacking with accountability, I thought: taking pictures of all my midafternoon snacks and late-night indulgences will turn my liaisons with Mallomars into a war-crimes tribunal of eating.

It worked for a day or two. The bother of having to find my iPhone, so I could capture, say, the handful of cashews that I wanted to eat while watching TV at night was a powerful corrective. But gradually, the idea of photo-documenting my dietary intake struck me as abject, like Andy Warhol obsessing over his taxi receipts or Howard Hughes hoarding bottles of his urine.

Moreover, I had perhaps naively hoped that my afternoon enablers — the people who grace the world with baked goods — would balk at my taking pictures of their wares before I ate them. But these people loved Meal Snap.

“Cool idea, bro,” a vendor at a muffin cart on Lower Broadway told me as I snapped away; a vendor at the Bread Alone stand at the Union Square farmers market asked for my camera to take the picture himself, saying he had the better vantage point. An ebullient, rawboned gentleman manning a coffee and doughnut cart at the corner of Houston and Broadway also cheered me on; he said, “Technology is so high today. Soon they will be able to tell you in your head to go left, go right, go left.”

I asked him, “Is that the kind of future you want?” He said, “I don’t know. But pictures of doughnuts are very nice.”

Fitness

I had much better luck with two apps devoted to exercise. I had three good sessions with Learn Hip Hop Dance, a series of videos starring a highly charming Samuel L. Jackson-type named Professor Lock, who’s given to expressions like “Indubitably, indubitably” and “Y’all stay in there like swimwear.”

You start with lessons like “Find the Beat” and “Shoulder Lean.” You ease into segments like “Strobing,” “Bobbing,” “Ticking.” Then you explode into “Cat Daddy,” “Smurf Dance,” “Sponge Bob,” “Watergate Dance.” I did my best to follow along to these videos while standing in my gym clothes in the office I rent; I was up in da club like Dilbert.

Even better for me — because it’s condensed, and because it’s pure routine, rather than Learn Hip Hop’s lesson-followed-by-routine — is the Johnson & Johnson 7 Minute Workout. Here are seven heart-hammering, sweat-producing minutes of push-ups and jumping jacks and other instruments of torture, somehow made palatable by each exercise’s brevity (about 60 seconds) and recovery time (about 5 seconds).

Though the app encourages you ultimately to do three circuits of seven-minute workouts, I would point out that that would be a 21-minute workout, a kind of false advertising tantamount to finding every copy of “War and Peace” and crossing out the words “War and.”

Around the house

My household ills take two forms. Most pressing are my apartment’s array of funky door hinges and other forms of discombobulation. This brought me into contact with what would be my favorite of the apps, TaskRabbit. Here are scores of willing and able folk proffering various kinds of domestic and event-staffing assistance.

I typed in my household tasks, my location and a date; TaskRabbit showed me 12 mini-profiles of people with handyman skills. Their rates ranged from $38 to $250 an hour. I chose Andy, the second least expensive ($50), who had a large number of flattering customer reviews.

Warm and tall, Andy carried a knapsack of tools; he is possibly the handsomest man who has ever been in my boyfriend’s and my apartment. Seconds after Andy arrived, I remembered with some embarrassment that my request had featured the sentence “I have water spurting out of my tub handles.” Andy, who is also an actor (he came fresh from auditioning for an Irish Spring commercial), methodically and quickly fixed four door hinges and a bureau drawer in an hour: blammo.

He confessed that he didn’t know how to fix the tub handles or our loose bathroom tiles; but the next day, when TaskRabbit asked for a review, I wrote, “This man has brought joy into our home.” TaskRabbit then asked, one through 10, how likely I was to recommend the app to a friend; I said nine. Asked why I chose nine, I wrote, “Ease. The trope of the hot handyman. The $15 initial discount.”

A week later Greg and I hired Andy again, to fix the sagging springs on our dining room chairs. Slightly rattled by the prospect of beholding his good looks again, I found myself cleaning the apartment before his arrival. An hour in, I told Andy: “I see that you identify on your Twitter account as a Christian actor. A Christian and a carpenter: That’s a heavy burden.” Andy responded, “I’m not Christ.”

I asked, “But have you considered growing your hair out and taking on a facial expression of constant pain?” With mock anguish, Andy asked, “‘What have you people done to me?’”

Two and a half hours later, I told Andy how great it was to find someone to do small household tasks. I said, “In an ideal world, you’d be like Kato Kaelin and live in our backyard.” Andy’s voice went all twangy: “‘We broke some stuff, y’all!’” He smiled and confessed, “I don’t know why I did that with a Southern accent.”

Had we simply gotten lucky with Andy? A few days later, I went back onto TaskRabbit and hired another rabbit, this one at $25 an hour, to dust a lot of books and help clean a rug. Upon his arrival, I told Tanael, a friendly, young stand-up comic from Haiti, “I’m going to reveal my deepest, darkest, most shameful secret to you.” Tanael’s eyes widened as he asked, “Am I ready for this?” He then helped my boyfriend and me to move our wooden sleigh bed 12 feet so that I could clean an 18-years-untouched hellpit of cat hair and abandoned shoes thereunder. The next day I wrote a review for Tanael: “Tuh-NILE is tuh-RRIFIC.”

Food

On the home front, I could also use some variation to the rotation of 15 or so dishes that I make for dinner. So I subscribed to Plated, a weekly service that, for about $12 a plate, sends you the ingredients and a recipe to make an entree. On my first foray, I selected from 10 great-sounding dishes and chose roasted parsnips with beef Bolognese, and carrot coriander soup topped with roasted, crunchy chickpeas.

When my food arrived in an ice pack-equipped cardboard box two days later, I discovered I had been sent mustard chicken instead of the beef Bolognese. I called Plated, and a friendly employee named Heather quickly emailed me a recipe for the chicken, and credited my account $24. Then, some 30 minutes later, I discovered I had been sent only one piece of chicken instead of two.

When I wrote the company about the missing chicken, and received an automated response asking what I thought of Plated’s customer service, I screamed at my computer. I wrote back that I loved Plated’s food, but was confused about the chicken oversight. “O, Plated. I don’t know what to do about you,” I wrote. “I worry that your eye is on another customer — and that you sometimes whisper to this other customer, ‘Extra chicken.’”

A few hours later, though, Heather sent me a lovely response. After I had ordered several more meals, when I ultimately decided to terminate my subscription, she wrote that she was sorry I was leaving: “The last thing I would want you to think is that you’re just another number in the system because that is not the case.”

Fashion

I’ve always maintained that you can’t buy pants or shoes online, because you need to try them on. So for my final app experience, I decided to try to buy a pair of wool pants. Typing my vitals in to three fashion apps — Hugo Boss, Shop It to Me, and Gilt Groupe — I soon had ordered six pairs of pants, all of them returnable.

The pants arrived in a flurry of cardboard boxes. I loved two of them, both from Gilt: a pleated, slightly nappy wool-cashmere blend from Incotex ($129), and a white and maroon striped pair of flannel-like flat fronts from Michael Bastian ($129). That evening, while trying these two pairs on, I told Greg: “Help me decide which pair to keep. The correct answer is, ‘Maybe you should keep them both.’” Greg surveilled the offerings and said, “Maybe you should keep them both.” Cue bluebirds.

Meanwhile, I returned the other pants, all of which had fallen prey to two forces: the lack of universal sizing and an online consumer’s inability to touch the merchandise. The Shop It to Me pants, a lightweight herringbone wool from Brooks Brothers ($248), were too tight. As were a pair of flat fronts from Tiger of Sweden ($169); I wrote on Gilt’s website: “Tight as an embolism stocking. You’d have to cut me out of them with scissors.”

I had an errand to run near the Hugo Boss store in SoHo, so I presented the box of two Hugo pants to a helpful salesman named Jorge who said he’d send them back for me. I told a smiley, gorgeous colleague of Jorge’s (think Lupita Nyong’o in a gray man’s suit) that the pants weren’t woolly or unusual enough for me.

“I like them,” I said, “But their message is a little off. Their message is ‘Sometimes at Work They Ask Me to Change the Xerox Toner.’ But I’m trying to say, ‘Free Liquor in the Faculty Lounge!’” Lupita enthused, “I love that! Love that.” Three minutes later, as I left the store, she bade me goodbye with: “OK, lovey. You enjoy that, the free liquor in the room.”

Final thoughts

My three weeks of app mania are behind me now. I’m left with a much-improved apartment, an exercise regimen that I can perform anywhere, two pairs of great-looking wool pants, and many, many iPhone photos of muffins. I am barraged by emails daily from most of the apps I used; nothing makes me feel quite as numb as a fashion app trying to interest me in its “sweater weather event.”

I used to be ticked off when the music service Pandora asked me, “Are you still listening?” because it seemed like a thousand pounds of neediness from a source I wasn’t expecting. But nothing rivals the irritation of being over 40 and trying to fit into pants fashioned after drainpipes.

I’ve gone two steps forward and one back. In the end, I’m now more open to any technology that will bring me into contact with good workers and good services; but I’m more irritated than ever by emails that emerge from commerce’s primordial soup.

My story is bittersweet. I know I’ll never want to be told to go left, go right, go left. But now I think pictures of doughnuts can be very nice.