The 2004 film Mean Girls is a modern-day masterpiece, and I have been thinking about it constantly at Mobile World Congress (MWC) this week, because everywhere I turn, I feel that technology companies are channeling the spirit of Gretchen Wieners.

As part of the Plastics clique, Gretchen tried desperately to make fetch the Next Big Thing. "That's so fetch," was the ultimate in praise, to be used only to describe the coolest of the cool. Just as Queen Bee Regina George had to put Gretchen in her place and bitchily tell her, "Stop trying to make 'fetch' happen. It's not going to happen," I think that the technology companies need to be told the same.

Stop trying to make "NFC" happen. It's not going to happen.

Or at least, not the way they want it to happen.

I've been using a number of NFC-equipped handsets this week. To get into MWC you normally need to show your badge (they contain RFID/NFC chips) and show a photo ID, such as a passport. But if you downloaded the MWC badge app, available for both Windows Phone 8 and Android, you can use your NFC-equipped phone instead of a photo ID.

I duly installed and set up the app and used it to get into the convention center each day. It was the first time I've ever actually used the NFC feature on my phone for anything "useful." It wasn't actually very useful. It was quicker than using a passport to get in, but only because most attendees didn't have NFC phones or hadn't bothered to install and set up the app, meaning that that NFC entrance had the shortest lines.

Actually getting NFC to work was annoying. I know that hackers and security researchers like to demonstrate reading NFC and RFID chips from many feet away, but the NFC scanners used at the MWC entrance gates were very conservative. You had to put the phone's NFC chip in exactly the right spot or they wouldn't let you in, and that's more annoying than it should be, because I don't actually know where the NFC chip is in the phones I have. So I ended up scrubbing the phone over the reader for a few seconds like a chump each time I wanted to get in.

Of course, a more systematic approach to using the gates, slowly sliding the phone over the reader until it worked, would have let me figure out where the chip was, but when you're being watched by an impatient security person, there's no time to be systematic. Scrubbing like a chump it is.

Once past the gate, NFC reared its head elsewhere. Dotted around the walkways between exhibition halls were posters with links to useful conference information like maps, agendas, and so on. Each link was not a URL, but an NFC tag. Waggle the phone at the tag and it would launch a browser pointing to the right URL.

A year or two ago, we'd have done the same thing with QR codes.

In fact, the NFC tags remind me of QR codes a lot. Just as nobody uses QR codes (because you look ridiculous, and as often as not they're too far away or too small to easily scan anyway, even if you wanted to, which you don't), I can't imagine many people use NFC tags either. Samsung has run ad campaigns where NFC-equipped posters gave Galaxy S III users the ability to download exclusive songs; I can't say I've ever seen someone actually use one.

The traditionally advocated uses for NFC have been to replace RFID chips in travel cards, such as the Oyster card in the UK, and RFID chips in credit cards, such as MasterCard's PayPass.

The problem with these replacements is a simple one, however. Smartphone batteries run out. They do so with alarming regularity, and they do so at inopportune moments. I don't care what phone you say you have, and I don't care if you say it doesn't happen to you, because it does. You end up staying out late, or you leave your charger at home by accident, or you just plain use the phone too much during the day, and then when you need the phone to work, it doesn't because it's out of juice.

The phone running out of power is bad enough when it means you don't have maps and directions. That's annoying. But even worse is the battery going flat when you need the phone for mass transit or paying for stuff.

And yet that's precisely the value proposition that NFC offers: go out for a night on the town and get stranded with no money, no subway ride home. The only way to be safe is to take your credit card and travel card with you anyway, and if you're doing that? Well you don't exactly need NFC then, do you?

Technically, NFC applications can be designed to work even when the phone is dead, using the SIM card for secure storage. This is great when you have a SIM (phones do, obviously, but most tablets do not), and when software is written to support it. In practice, plenty doesn't, either because it uses interactive authentication and network connectivity (such as Google Wallet) or because the developer wanted to maximize compatibility (such as the MWC application).

Always keen to back a winner, MasterCard announced at MWC that it was going to start supporting QR codes for payments too. It's launching a new cloud-based payment service called MasterPass that extends the existing PayPass system to also support payments by QR code and traditional credit card.

I can't wait to pay for stuff by QR code.

The most frustrating bit of this is that there are uses of NFC that make sense and manage to be genuinely useful. A bunch of current Bluetooth devices include NFC chips. This enables pairing—which has always been Bluetooth's monstrous weakness—to be achieved simply by tapping. I would hope that Bluetooth 5 mandates NFC and tap-to-pair, because it makes Bluetooth so much better.

Wi-Fi Direct, when established with an NFC tap, is also logical and useful.

The key to these uses is that they're not taking existing, robust, passive technology and adding to it a gratuitous and unwanted battery life constraint. They're taking things that are normally annoying, fiddly, and battery-powered anyway, and making them easier.

Push this kind of use, and while NFC may never be an exciting technology, it could well become an essential one. And that sounds fetch enough to me.