The First World Whinging Thread

^^ I'm having all kinds of internet problems, and it seems everyone is that I talk to. Neither one of my emails has worked for over a week now, and though some of the 'is it down' sites say both servers are working fine, there are endless posts underneath by people saying "What do you mean, working fine? It isn't working for me!"

 

Perhaps Skynet has taken over.

 

And I blame you for it, Asch.

I didn't feel called out. But seeing the post again made me cringe. And I still blame Asch.

 

I think this qualifies as First World whinging, since most people in the world are fortunate to have permanent shelter, and I own a house in good shape with a fairly new and thus far working furnace. I just shoveled (thanks snowblower repair shop for still not getting it back to me) my second 6-inch snowfall this week from my walks and driveway, and cleared a three-foot wall of ice and packed snow from the end of my driveway (thanks city-snowplow-man) and now we are plunging into a 2-week deep freeze of subzero (F) temperatures. This is one of those rare times when we all look at each other and say, over our masks of course, "why again is it that we live here?" But then things warm up a bit and the good things thaw out.

 

This perpetual rain causing signal problems with my Sky reception on a number of channels - possibly something to do with said channels using a weaker transponder maybe? I dunno. Could just be my decades old Sky box approaching end of life. I called Sky last week. Said they’d upgrade me to Q free of charge. So the engineer gets me out of bed 8:10 this morning to tell me he can’t do the job because there’s inadequate means of ‘anchoring’ his ladder on the outside of the property. The dish is easily accessible from the little veranda I have outside my living room, but of course coming into the property could cost him his job due to COVID. So I phone Sky and they reschedule the job for next Saturday. Apparently they have a ‘specialist’ team for such situations. Why they can’t just send out all their engineers equipped with everything they might need, god only knows!! So now I have put up with a service I’m only getting half of for another seven days due to their incompetence!

 

It’s not the rain. SkyNet is just booting up their AI prototypes. It takes a lot of bandwidth.

 

I liked it but I didn’t get it.

 

Ah crap, my ISP seems to be down. On my phone now, but that's a lousy way to watch Netflix with Mrs A.

 

Minus 13 degrees F, minus 25 C, windchills of minus 25-35 F. I have nowhere I must go; there are street people out there who have nowhere they can go.

 

[I'm permitting myself one post in The Lounge for each critique I offer in The Workshop.]

This could also go in Things You Recently Bought or Got, but I just replaced my working-fine Ubuntu box with a refurbished Windows 10 desktop, just because I couldn't find a Linux file manager that worked the way I wanted it to (which is to say, worked like Windows File Explorer). I'm working on a couple of new websites, with a lot of file editing and FTPing, and the Linux Way just wasn't working for me.

 

Not sure that counts as first world whinging exactly.

 

I've been trying to log into our new telephone provider's internet site so I can complain that they sent the bill to the wrong person. They've set up a wonderful catch 22 where you can't login until you've been authenticated but they have also saved money by getting rid of most of their call centre jobs too. So now I've been on hold for 2 hours with my call regularly being dropped because they didn't answer it in time.

I don't like their "Why don't you visit our website at XXXX where you can do everything you can do over the phone" rubbish. If I could do it on the website, I would have already.

I particularly hate how their first automated message is "We're experiencing higher than normal call volumes, so there will be a delay in answering your call today. Your call is important to us, so we'll get to you as soon as we can." That's BS, because every telco here has that same message playing 24/7, no matter the "call volumes". I don't know what their definition of "normal" is, but it certainly doesn't tally with anything I consider normal!

 

It's astonishing how your experience matches mine almost exactly, despite us being on opposite sides of the globe. My previous phone provider shut down their phone call centres mid last year, ostensibly because they were affected by COVID. They pinky swore that all of the functionality I could possibly want or need was available through their online platform.

They certainly got some programmers to sweat it out and add extra functionality. The added functionality allowed you to upgrade your plan, order a new phone or SIM card and other such things, most of which involved them getting more $$$ out of you.

The functions that were not added were downgrading your account, cancelling your account, technical helpdesk and reporting faults. For that, you had to wait a few months for them to deign to reopen call centres. Call me a conspiracy theorist here, but do I detect a pattern?

 

In a separate rant, we got a technician out today for the internet line into work. He duly plugged in his gadgets and then said he knew what the problem was and vanished in his van, presumably to go and look at the line, the exchange or maybe he was just getting a coffee on the job. An hour later he was back to pack up while claiming everything was fixed.

A couple of minutes after he left, I got two automated SMS messages. The first said that the issue was fixed and they were closing the ticket. The second was to say they had detected it wasn't fixed and they would have to send out the technician again. They asked if I wouldn't mind logging into the link they provided to book a new appointment? Sure enough, our internet connection was dead and, of course, I can't use the desktop computer with no internet connection to book a new appointment. So I had a bright idea to do it on the mobile, but then I discover that their booking web page doesn't work on my mobile device (a very new Samsung). I eventually hauled out my laptop and ran its internet connection through my mobile phone, only to discover the first available appointment is the middle of next week.

Why couldn't the technician have waited a couple of minutes to validate this work? He hightailed it out of the building so fast, I strongly suspect he knew it wasn't fixed, but he just wanted to close the ticket instead of troubleshooting the real problem.

 

I’m rather relieved to read it’s not just in the UK that the ‘experts’ and engineer techs regularly fuck up on such a biblical level.

 

Wow, you get that in Oz as well? That's exactly the message every utility company, bank etc. in this country plays.

 

... All Skynet.

 

I had my gas company (British Gas) tell me on the phone today, "There's a strike on at the moment so we can't send an engineer out."

My response?
"There's an engineer downstairs right now working on my gas meter."

 

The batteries for the remote on my toilet seat died and I'm all out of AAs, gotta get dressed and walk a hundred yards (each way!!!!) to the drugstore to get new ones.

It's either that or not only use my hands or feet to lift the seat and lid like some 2001: A Space Odyssey apeman.

Don't even mention the horrors of wiping, should the need arise.

And it's 16c out today.

I am just going outside, I may be some time.

 

It's Japan. Everyone does if it isn't a whole in the floor. But even then there's usually a hanging shower head.