swearing in Texan

Last edited by Flint (3/09/2023 1:01 pm)

I curse at my computer about a dozen times a day.  Has technology just gotten that much worse?  The f*cking thing always does what I don't want it to.

This is all on my work computer.  They are trying to make too many systems work with each other and they don't want to play nice with one another.  My latest beef is that when I remote in from home, my mouse often double clicks when I just want to single click.  Swapping the mouse out doesn't fix it.  But it's not every time.  Motherf*cking piece of shit.  

Don't get me started on how often I have to enter my user ID and password

my main things:
1) it takes 8 seconds to print a document, the app is locked up during that time
2) docking station 'bricks' that plug into the laptop via thunderbolt are buggy and unreliable on a daily basis, the hardware docking stations were bulletproof and worked 100% of the time
3) have to register with Microsoft every time I open a word document on a different computer on my network, while already logged in with my AD credentials on that computer
4) Outlook email offers conditional formatting to customize/make your inbox easier to read, but it forgets the formatting 50% of the time you enter and exit the 'search' feature

ALL NEW ITEMS, related to single sign-on software
--It frequently locks my desktop, while I am literally in the middle of clicking and dragging something and haven't even let go of the mouse button yet, so literally ZERO seconds of inactivity.
--I multi-task on multiple computers on my desk, so now everything but my main computer has to run a 'mouse jiggler' to stay active. Consequently, I am 'green' on Teams for 100% of the day.

--the best one.. When I'm signed on to my computer, on a Teams meeting, sharing a screen with a remote server session where I'm also logged into with my network admin account, and I give control of my meeting mouse to the vendor (the whole purpose of the call) periodically my own mouse will disappear. Not JUST for the meeting, not JUST on the server session, but ALSO on my OWN COMPUTER. Meaning-- I can't un-mute myself to tell everyone what is happening. I can't close the meeting and re-join. I can't do anything, I'm completely frozen out. I have to TEXT my boss to ask the vendor to give me mouse control back. Then it happens again multiple times during the meeting. This didn't happen before single sign-on and I think the system is marking me 'inactive' on the remote server, because *I* haven't moved my mouse, despite the vendor busily clicking away..??

I spend a large part of the day fighting with things and, just.. waiting a perceptible period of time for a response to my mouse click. I'M MOVING FASTER THAN THE COMPUTERS AND I ONLY SLEPT 5 HOURS LAST NIGHT.. I should NOT be outperforming anything. Ten years ago when I was much faster, the computers were outperforming me. What the fvck happened?

glatt wrote:

I curse at my computer about a dozen times a day.  Has technology just gotten that much worse?  The f*cking thing always does what I don't want it to.

This is all on my work computer.  They are trying to make too many systems work with each other and they don't want to play nice with one another.  My latest beef is that when I remote in from home, my mouse often double clicks when I just want to single click.  Swapping the mouse out doesn't fix it.  But it's not every time.  Motherf*cking piece of shit.  

Don't get me started on how often I have to enter my user ID and password

I have been feeling this pain this week
 

Last edited by monster (3/09/2023 11:14 pm)

Yeah, I feel it. Change for the sake of change is freaking exhausting. I just want to do my job.

I just had an attorney send a legal form back to me to fix.  I was filling out this web based USPTO form yesterday and specifically remember adding in our reference number in the appropriate field, but when we went to send the form to the client today for execution, the attorney saw that the first 12 digits of her full name were in the reference number field instead.

Chrome apparently auto-populated/overwrote the field with data it had saved from previous times I have filled out the form, but the form was so long, it didn't all fit on my screen, and I didn't see that our reference number was overwritten as I worked further down the page. I remember the screen kind of jumping around at some point as I entered our address, and that must have been when it overwrote my data.

Technically, this is my fault, because I didn't review the completed form closely enough.  It had about 50 or so discrete fields completed, and I was looking closely at the important fields. The client's name and what the client was alleging.  Shame on me.

So this attorney, who charges out at something like $500-600 per hour was double checking my work before it went out the door, and found this.

I'm not in trouble or anything, but this is a clear example of technology failing the user.

Flint wrote:

Anybody else getting the alert for device connecting-- be-BOOP, and disconnecting-- BE-boop, constantly throughout the day, for a phantom device that doesn't exist?

My home machine does this if I charge a headlamp on it. It also used to do it with my Suunto watch which I finally gave up on because the interface was a fucking nightmare.
 

Listening to you pros grouse makes me feel a little better.
I had a system built by a local shop that hardly gave me any headaches for ten years.
When it got cranky and then quit, I got a new HP with Windows 11.
HP and Microsoft think it is theirs, not mine.
I hate to admit it, but it took me a month to find the power button, controlling it with the power plug.  That was OK in a way because I was never sure HP wasn't talking to Bill G or others when I was out of the room.
I still can't believe it came without word processing (buy separately), not to mention data base and spreadsheet capabilities.  And FreeCell for fuck's sake.
I guess these and dozens of other roadblocks are all improvements that took over during the ten years I thought computing was fun and useful.

My box updated itself to Win11 about a month ago, and ever since then I can't get pictures off my sd card.  On Win 10, which I also hated, I put the card in the slot and a screen opened with my files visible.  Now I put the card in the slot, and nothing happens.  And I can't find the other (manual) way of doing it anymore.  So now I have a $700 camera that I have to use the screen on the back to look the pictures.

Change for the sake of change.
 

Happy Monkey wrote:

The power button on my HP work laptop is, insanely,a button that looks like all of the other keyboard buttons, right next to the DELETE button.
 

I've seen one of those, somewhere. It was the same plastic and same mold as the keyboard keys, and arranged in-line with the keyboard. Amazing that this could be a design choice they actually went with.

I'm writing a whole near field sci-fi based on human foibles in the technology industry causing us to arrive in neither a technological utopia, nor a cynical dystopia, but a jumble-fvcked future that's just as stupid as things have always been (metaphors based on things like RCA failing to produce a home recording device because of insistence on favoring a vinyl capacitance disc over magnetic tape, compounded by their competing "pure research" and "market research" divisions) but there's definitely still a place for stupid decisions like this one. I'm imagining, what if the laptop that controlled a "Chernobyl" was turned off because a junior technician didn't realize it was the "off" button. It's just that easy to change the causality of a whole timeline.

Hey, at least they left the needed cables in a baggie at the bottom of the case LOL