Tag: Modern Problems

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Ya know, Maybe it’s me…

Why is it that Customer Service / Technical Support has gotten to be such a pain in the ass?

I had an issue with my watch connected to my cellular plan. I tried to resolve it and realized I was out of my depth. Going in, I wasn’t frustrated just curious and was hoping for a little clarity and assistance.

During the course of the troubleshooting I ended up speaking with 9 different customer service/technical support people. Three of the calls dropped during troubleshooting, only one of these people called me back. None of them had a fucking clue. Overall, I spent 4 hours on the phone and was worse off than when I started.

For clarity, this cellular company touts that their customer service is US based.

Every single person I spoke with asked for my name, my zip code, my pin, and a callback number. It’s crazy that after I’ve gotten hold of someone that every time they transferred me to a new person I had to give the authentication crap again.

I look at it as once I’m in the system, they’re transferring me internally and from my perspective I’m on the same damn call. 

After the 6th or 7th transfer, repeating the whole story, and having to authenticate gets really tedious!

When I was answering phone calls in a tech support department, I’d solve the problem or I’d stay on the line to hand a person off to someone who could. What passes for “service” in call centers these days is really crappy.

The last call I was on Thursday night, I’d finally gotten to a person who seemed like he might have had a clue and we’d reset my watch to factory defaults AGAIN. Then he put me on hold to check something, and the call dropped.

In the case of a smart watch, that leaves the customer with their device more broken than when they started. He never called me back and oh, their customer service department closed shortly after the call dropped.

I completed the setup of my watch to return it to functional, then went about my evening. The problem I’d called about was still present.

When I called the company the next morning, I went through the whole authentication bit, and explained the problem again then asked to speak with someone who was higher up in the hierarchy who had a lot of experience because the problem was apparently a difficult one that the “normal” troubleshooting steps didn’t resolve.

The woman I was talking to refused my request. Then demanded that I call them back on another phone, other than my only cell phone.

Uhh excuse me?

She said with more than a bit of attitude that I needed to go tie up a friend’s phone line to accomplish troubleshooting and refused to assist me further.

If you’ve read any of this blog, you know that was exactly the wrong thing to say to me.

When it became clear that she wasn’t going to budge. And was giving me attitude about it. I countered with, “Okay, then transfer me to someone that can give me a transfer PIN.”

[Transfer PIN numbers are used when you’re changing cellphone carriers and you’re taking your phone number with you.]

She hung up.

OH HELL NO!

Nuclear-Bomb-Explosion-in-City.jpgWhat could have been a major hiccup, possibly even a recoverable one, was now nuclear.

I called back, got another person, outside technical support, and made my intentions clear then explained why. I was nice. Well as nice as I could be given the situation. I suggested that she make a note of the account and forward it to their sales/marketing department, because this is how you lose customers.

She gave me the PIN. I walked the dog, came home, showered, and drove to the local T-Mobile store.

Don’t get me wrong, T-Mobile’s phone Customer / Technical support is terrible. They’re all in India, none of them know anything other than what their little scripts tell them to do. But unbelievably, my former carrier’s Customer / Technical support was worse!

The hell of all of this is that during the evening after I’d had the call drop the last time on Thursday night, I was poking around in the settings of the phone & watch and had discovered an anomaly.

I wanted to talk to a person experienced in phone number provisioning and e-sim deployment because I thought I’d found the problem and we could have resolved the issue. However I wanted to verify the theory before touching or deleting the anomaly and potentially making the problem worse.

In my naive way, I thought perhaps by talking to one of their higher level people who had actual knowledge, we could solve my problem. While making sure all the rest of their technical support people could have the knowledge incorporated into their scripts allowing them to solve similar issues for others in the future.

Silly me! I thought companies still wanted continuous improvement.

Anyway, I walked into the T-Mobile retail store. One hour later, after some laughs and honestly fun, I was back with T-Mobile and my phone & watch are working flawlessly.

I didn’t opt for the newest T-Mobile plans that have all the bells and whistles. I don’t have Hulu, or Netflix, through them, and I don’t have HD video streaming over cellular, or their new satellite service.

I’ve got what I need. Basic communications on both the phone & watch and enough data to handle my meager needs. Granted it’s more expensive, but if I have a problem I can walk into a store and have at least some hope of having an issue resolved. Or I can let them deal with their customer service while I have a cup of coffee.

An added perk is that I can get a new phone using Apple Pay’s zero % financing if I want to.

I guess, if all technical support is going to be shit, and all their reps are going to stick to troubleshooting scripts and never actually think outside the box, then we’re pretty much on our own.

On the one hand going as cheap as possible has merit. On the other hand if you want to have the ability to have face time instead of having calls dropped while you’re trying to solve a problem,  and overall better cellular service then maybe it’s reasonable to pay a little more.

A year & a half ago T-Mobile really pissed me off. It was enough to make me flush them after 13 years or so. I went to another carrier and they were fine until I needed assistance.

Maybe the new paradigm is when something breaks, don’t call customer service.

Instead just change companies.

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As predicted the UK is implementing Digital ID, but it’s worse and faster than anticipated.

A while back I wrote a couple of pieces about digital IDs. The most recent is linked Here . An older one is linked Here. 

Logo ec en.Yesterday I ran across articles about the UK rolling out compulsory digital ID, and another article about the EU beginning a digital ID program for visitors to EU countries. There’s another article about a Swiss version, I stumbled across this morning.

I also noted that North Dakota added their digital drivers license to the Apple Wallet, (but they’re charging their residents a fee for the privilege).

The EU digital ID program is starting mid October. This system requires visitors to supply fingerprints, and submit to a facial scan for entry to EU countries. The claim is that they’ll be able to do away with passport stamps and better be able to identify people who overstay their visas. They also claim that fingerprints and facial scans will only be maintained for 3 years.

Meaning, if you only visit one of these countries and never go back to any other EU country, 3 years after your visit they’ll purge the record. I personally think they’ll never purge those records. 3 years is a long time and I’m positive that additional laws will be enacted that make those records permanent. 

After all, the UK & EU have both been pushing for backdoors into private phone data for everyone on the planet. There’s every reason to believe they’re trying to, and will succeed in building some kind of database of not only their own citizens, but also any visiting tourists.

One article suggested that if a tourist for example refused to provide this biometric data, they’d be denied entry to the country requesting the information.

Hey, a country is entitled to maintain control over their national borders. (Unless the country’s name is the United States, ahem.)

As a tourist, I don’t necessarily want to provide biometric data, so I guess any ideas I had about visiting Europe are toast once this system is fully implemented.

My passport chip contains biometrics as well and honestly, I’m not thrilled about that either. The difference is that I have control over my passport and who sees it. Once that chip is scanned though, my data is subject to being uploaded to whatever database a requester sees fit.

Fundamentally, and in a perfect world where governments could be trusted I’m good with providing this kind of information. The problem is, we don’t live in a perfect world, and no government can be trusted.

I go into it in some detail in the posts I referenced at the top of this post.

In fact I’d already decided if I ever went to Europe that I’d leave all technology stateside. My reasoning, before the UK & EU mandates was that I didn’t want to risk being detained anywhere for an offensive meme, or a comment that was deemed “Hate speech” that might be on my phone.

I figured if I didn’t carry any tech, other than my Nikon, and refused to provide any email addresses there’s be no way I could post something someone didn’t like. Without access to my online accounts, the authorities in whatever country would have no way to review my online activity to determine if I passed their purity tests.

Yes, I used the term “Purity Test” with intention. That term hearkens back to Nazi Germany, Communism, and even the old “One Drop Rules” of the white supremacists in the Old South.

The primary difference today isn’t about skin color, or religion. It’s about compliance and purity of thought. Does a particular individual represent a threat to group think? Is that person’s presence likely to cause a disruption in thought amongst our subjects? Will this person raise or ask difficult questions?

Honestly, that’s what I think these mandates are about. It’s not just being identified, or verifying that someone is overstaying their visa or has government authorization to work.

It’s about linking an individual to their social media, which is a way to get inside their head, then limiting their privileges within the society based on how compliant a person is. Just as China is doing today.

This is authoritarianism. The UK and EU are running headlong into the abyss.

I naively thought that traveling without technology would provide some level of privacy. I no longer think that is sufficient.

The UK has famously blocked speakers from other countries one of whom is a gentleman who after much study is very critical of Islam. The first time they blocked him from entering the UK they waited until he’d made the flight to the UK. They knew they were going to ban him, but chose to cost him money by making the flight, then charging him for accommodation under guard until he could pay the extra fees to take an early flight back to the US.

It’s reasonable to ask when will the UK start scouring average people’s social media accounts as a condition of entry.

The UK is, I think a petrie dish of sorts for the EU. Yes, they’ve supposedly broken away from the EU, but they’re still headed away from freedom and into authoritarianism.

When you think about it, the UK is a perfect testing ground. They’re small, easily contained via blockade, disarmed, have a liberal population, and are steeped in white guilt.

Those factors mean that experimentation about how much a population will take before they revolt is relatively safe. If crushing authoritarian control results in civil war it’s no big deal. The EU can call in the UN for “Humanitarian reasons” and put down any rebellion.

Think that’s utter bullshit? Then why are some units of the London police force wearing UN blue uniforms? Why are common rights within the UK being abridged? Why are teenagers and adults being fined or arrested for social media posts? Why is it apparently illegal to fly traditional UK flags?

I think the powers that be behind the EU are still pulling the UK government’s strings and that it’s likely what’s happening in the UK is an experiment that’s reaching its end.

Which means the EU is going to implement all the things that people in the UK allowed with a minimum amount of grumbling in all their member nations.

It also means that I’m not going to see Europe in my lifetime. I’m probably never going on a dive trip outside the United States territorial waters again. Curaçao and Bon Aire for example are part of The Netherlands, they fall under EU law. Although, their restaurants, bars, and hotels prefer any currency other than Euros.

It would be easy to say to myself, “Well, I’m only a tourist and this biometric data they’re asking for is nothing to worry about.” That is probably a true statement and as an average person 100% correct for now.

But how long before AI can scan everything I’ve ever posted, find a “crime” in any particular country I’m visiting & arrest me? I’ve been critical of Islam, I’ve been critical of the UK, the US, the transgender movement, some of my opinions could be considered radical, hurtful, or I could be deemed an “agitator”.

While those comments may be legal in my home country (at the moment), they may be considered illegal in other countries and all countries have different statutes of limitations on such things.

If authoritarian governments have biometric data, linked to my digital ID, and via my digital ID they link things I’ve said, even in anger, on social media… Then any of it can be used to legally detain me, fine me, or imprison me.

Much as I like the idea of digital ID’s I think I’m going to so my best not to use them and I’ll see what I can do about deleting my digital ID footprint.

It’s not about engaging in criminal activity, It’s about denying those who would control me the opportunity. 

As a plus, I don’t have to pay the US government for my passport every 10 years.

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Rain & Thunder on a Saturday evening.

The thunder & lightening in the sky mirrors my mood at the moment, But I love it so much I’m calming down rapidly enjoying the sound of rain on the roof, and rumbling in the sky.

It’s so calming for me. Even Jesse seems to be enjoying it. He’s curled up in the chair, head on the arm snoozing. He’s completely unbothered by the noise and that bodes well if we move someplace in the future that has weather.

What had me raging was I love the modern age!

NOT!

I’ve finally gotten to the point that I’m ready to donate Jerry’s car to a charity organization. It’s got over 300K miles on it, still runs, (although at the moment the battery is dead.) Nothing though that a little time on the battery charger wouldn’t fix.

So, I called the same veterans donation organization I called last year to get rid of the dead trucks. 

Last year, getting rid of two trucks took one phone call to these folks. They collected the information, and they scheduled the pickup date in one phone call. They showed up on time, we filled out some paperwork and that was that. Military precision and efficiency.

96 hours later they sent me an email telling me what the trucks had sold for at auction and appropriate tax information.

It was a good experience. So I called them again on Thursday.

This time I was talking to a heavily accented Indian woman. Sigh…Last year it was an American dude, possibly a veteran. This year there was question after question and the woman was having a hard time understanding the answers. Last year, the guy answering the phone answered with the name of the organization I was donating to. The questions were few and straight forward.

This year the woman answered the phone as some weird donation firm and when I asked if she was part of the actual organization I was trying to donate to, she hemmed and hawed about it then said she was part of some donation clearing house that would direct my donation to the proper organization. Uhh, Okaaaay.

She didn’t schedule anything, she said someone would be calling me later. They didn’t call, they sent 4 text messages, and 3 emails. From a completely different organization. Okaaaay. One of the emails had a link to schedule the pickup. I clicked  the link and scheduled a pickup for Monday. I got 2 more text messages and an email confirming the pickup date.

I heard nothing on Friday from any of the (now three) organizations.

This morning I was out walking the dog, then came home dropped him off at home and went out to run some errands. At some point my phone must’ve rung, but I didn’t hear it and didn’t look at my phone until I got home.

There was a voicemail, again heavily accented that said, “I’m calling you regarding your vehicle to be picked up.” That was it, nothing else.

AND????

About the time I’m thinking what the hell, and fuming about the complete lack of telephone etiquette, I get another text message and an email from the third organization saying that the pickup had been cancelled.

The email was asking if I still wanted to donate.

What the actual FUCK? Now I’ve got four different organizations involved in this chain of Clusterfuckery™ and apparently the vehicle is not going to be picked up.

Well yes, I do still want to donate the vehicle, but not to you!

What the hell is wrong with people? Do they not think that perhaps someone might have other things to do than exist to answer their phone calls?

I’ll find someone else, preferably someone that does not involve any of the last three organizations.

I mean, why is everything so damn complex?

Oh well, back to listening to the thunder and rain on the roof.

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For the first time in a very long while…

I’m actively considering downgrading from an Apple update.

IOS 26 is pretty on my phone. It’s also pretty on my watch. But it’s very annoying.

Notifications half the time don’t show up on either my watch or my phone. Sometimes on one but not on the other, and sometimes on both. There’s no rhyme or reason to it.

I’ve checked and rechecked the settings and all the troubleshooting steps I can think of, and those suggested by Apple. Even turning off the “New” features doesn’t help.

How they could fuck up something that worked so well, is beyond me. I mean phone calls, and messages from known contacts not ringing? REALLY? That’s kind of basic stuff.

Thing is, it’s not any glaring “This is IT,” issue. It’s death by a thousand cuts. It’s little things.

For example, when starting a workout on my watch. In IOS18 I’d hit the action button on my ultra, that would take me to a list of workouts I’d done in the past. It was logically sorted by most frequent. I could tap the workout I was going to do and be off.

Now, hitting the action button takes me to the last workout I did. FULL SCREEN, No list, with a “Play” button.

If I want to select something else, I’ve got to roll the crown to see other selections.

They added an un-necessary complication to the process. The previous way was clean, direct, and simple.

It’s a minor thing, but it’s annoying. Then on the phone side you’ve got live activities which is fine and maybe even useful. But if you open the fitness app even after you’ve completed a workout and stopped it using the watch, there’s a screen showing the summary of that completed workout with a green check in the upper right hand corner.

Okay, but what I wanted out of the fitness app was something completely different, and now I’m forced to press the green checkmark to get to the underlying data screens in the fitness app.

Again another unnecessary step.

The whole of the OS is filled with extra, unnecessary steps that make working with my phone like answering 50 questions at a damn gas pump.

I just want gas! Take my money and turn on the fucking pump!

I’m not having a battery drain issue with my phone as so many others are, Because I’m not using it. Really, I’ve noticed I’m going to my computer for even the slightest bit of information.

Maybe this is just settling in stuff. Maybe I’ll get used to it. But I don’t need an interrogation from a device that is supposed to be my assistant, every time I interact with it.

Maybe this is just the age we live in.

Even researching the roll back process is annoying. I entered a search on how to roll back then found an article from Macobserver, fine. I tapped on the link, then Macobserver wanted age verification. WHAT? Then they wanted me to click on a check box the proved I was human. Then cloudflare pops up with a “Verifying” dialog and I still hadn’t gotten to the fucking article.

Why does everything have to be so complicated? I bailed on their page and made a different selection. Even then I was pounded with cookie notifications, an AI chat box to help answer my question, a Google login prompt, and some EU notification. ALL OF WHICH prevented me from reading a text article related to the question I asked. I couldn’t even see the title of the article to verify if it was what I actually wanted.

I bailed on that page, and went to the next listing in line. Finally! There was an article describing the process without all the bullshit!

Maybe I’m just cross.

Then again, maybe I’m just sick of bullshit at every turn of my existence.

It looks like downgrading from IOS 26, while possible, has a rather high risk of fucking up my phone, and data. I’ll have to reach a much higher level of annoyance before I undertake that project.

It’s got me thinking though.

I’m convinced that dumping the web hosting and this blog entirely, is in fact the right thing for me to do. It’s become such a headache I’m not interested anymore.

Between endless demands from the EU regulators to verify the owner and contact information on every single web domain, and them telling me that they’re implementing new rules to protect the delicate sensibilities of their members. I’m over it.

Gee Thanks Obama! You fucking moron! Turning over the domain registration to the EU was a fucking brilliant idea!

Well, the internet was a good idea, while it lasted…

I wonder if I can still get a print version of Encyclopedia Britannica? Why yes… it’s 2K on Amazon.

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Well now I’ve got their attention.

Microsoft Word Logo.Microsoft increased their “Personal” subscription price for Office 365 from something like $65 to $99 per year.

I’ll admit that’s not a lot of cash.

The problem is I barely used Microsoft software.

Outlook wasn’t any better than the mail client supplied with MacOS. The Apple email client works instantly and easily across all Apple devices. For its faults, it is reliable and doesn’t require for you put your contacts on Microsoft servers to be blasted across all their properties like LinkedIn and such.

In the entire time I’ve had Microsoft office, I don’t think I ever used PowerPoint for anything personal. I used it at work, but not at home. Excel, got more use, but not enough to justify the cost.

Word was about the only application I used with any frequency. As Word has evolved, it’s become less pleasurable and more annoying to use. So I wasn’t using it as much either. I was using Pages, Ulysses, or Scrivner. The latter two are configured more for writing things like stories. They’re clean and focused on their purpose. 

As I looked at the renewal. I realized it was the same price for 4 applications on a Mac as the price for what? 6 applications on Windows, and that I was really only using 25% of the Mac applications, I decided not to renew.

I made the decision about a month ago. The expiration date came & went. I’ve removed the Microsoft applications from my devices and now, I’m getting email notifications saying my subscription has lapsed and I should re-subscribe immediately to regain the benefits provided by their products.

Nope. Not interested. I’ve got a decent desktop publishing application, and Apple’s Pages for word processing documents. What Word or Pages couldn’t or can’t do, the desktop publisher can. Apple’s Numbers, and Keynote handle spreadsheets and presentations.

I’ve never used Keynote either. Nothing against it, I just don’t do that kind of presentation thing. I could, but why? I’m not presenting anything to anybody these days.

All the Apple apps read Microsoft formatted documents, they can output Microsoft compatible files and PDF documents if I need to share something, and they’re free.

Plus, I just saved 3 GB, (4 GB if you count Outlook which I’d purged a long time ago,) of space on my internal drive.

The Apple products all have the ability to back up versions, and like the Microsoft versions can save their data to cloud based storage. In the case of Microsoft, they insist that you use their cloud and refuse to turn on backups of documents unless the document is saved in their cloud.

Apple products likewise prefer to save their documents in the Apple Cloud which is end to end encrypted, and which through the use of Apple’s AFP system are encrypted in the cloud so that supposedly, even Apple can’t hack them.

I never much liked Microsoft’s cloud solution either and therefore didn’t use it.

This leads me to wonder about maintaining Windows on my Mac. Most of the apps that I routinely use are available on the Mac, so the reason for maintaining VMWare and running Windows is greatly diminished. VMWare having been sold and their subsequent moves regarding VMWare Fusion (the Mac VMWare) also calls into question the necessity to allocate 40GB of disk storage there. I don’t recall the last time I fired up VMWare or the Windows system. It’s Windows 11 which is okay, but there’s not much point in having it, if I’m not going to use it.

Thinking about it, and that my job search is going nowhere, maybe I should just back it up to the NAS and flush it from my Mac. If I need it, I can pull it from the NAS, if I don’t need it, It won’t be taking up space needlessly and I’ll know the answer.

Besides, it might be better to do away with VMWare and instead go to Parallels in the event that I need Windows on the Mac. Perhaps a better solution would be that if due to employment needs, I need a Windows machine, I just buy a cheap assed Windows laptop. Those are a dime a dozen.

This may be a stepping off point from Microsoft for me. They have nothing that I can’t get elsewhere. I have to point out that Pages, opens native Word docs faster than Word does on my Mac. That’s pretty darn interesting.