It’s not that I couldn’t have gone out and bought a new one years and years ago. After all, there’s a wide range of types and prices, and I mostly read and write on mine so I don’t need anything all that fancy. But what I hate, and what keeps me clinging – bitterly or otherwise – to the one I have is that I hate transitions to new devices and new systems.

And so I’ve been putting it off – for years. I nurse my old one along. It’s a Lenovo laptop, and people laugh when they see it, especially the keyboard. It has been worn down, like mountains that have been around for half a billion years. I’m going to post a photo, even though this is highly embarrassing:

And yes, I know I not only could get a new computer, but I could instead just get a new keyboard and attach it to the old laptop. But the keyboard is only a small part of the problem.

The seductive thing is – sometimes my computer works just fine. In fact, most of the time it works just fine. And so it lulls me into procrastinating on the task of replacing it – until I hit a day like today, when it’s been balky and strange and then suddenly, for no discernible reason at all, it’s fine again.

And, in the nature of computers, it’s not telling me: why today? Why now? Maybe it’s something else besides the ancient computer. Maybe it’s the wifi connection. Maybe it’s the weather. Maybe it’s – who knows?

And please please don’t tell me to get a Mac. Had one for many years and hated it. I never never never got used to it.

The post I need a new computer appeared first on The New Neo.

It wasn’t the first time I’d noticed it; the problem’s been going on for a while. It’s a subtle thing, not too bad but still mighty annoying for a person who uses a computer a lot.

Up popped a message saying that Firefox was running slow, and then it helpfully asked me whether I wanted to refresh it in order to make it go faster.

Now, ordinarily I am intensely conservative about anything involved with the running of my computer. That’s because I’ve noticed over and over that the people who come up with new, improved computer systems seem to have a different idea than I do about what constitutes an “improvement.”

In fact, their ideas and mine have often seemed diametrically opposed.

In particular, they love to do two things. The first is to assure the user that everything will go smoothly and that all settings will be saved. The second is to hide the elements the user loves, so that they never again can be found; and/or to replace words with tiny icons that are nearly indistinguishable from one other and might as well be hieroglyphics as far as I’m concerned.

This Firefox refresh suggestion caught me in a weakened, tired state. Oh, why not? I thought, uncharacteristically throwing caution to the winds. I’d like this to go faster.

Click.

The refresh went about as you’d expect. My familiar landmarks had disappeared, and in their place were icons, cryptic lines or dots, or blank space. What’s more, my bookmarks were gone.

Now, to you that may not seem like much. But I’m a huge user of bookmarks. Over the years I’ve collected hundreds, my little computer library.

Gone. Totally gone.

But although I broke out into a cold sweat, I figured there must be a solution. I found several webpages that purported to offer one. I’ll not bore you further with the tedious tale of exactly what happened when I tried to follow their labyrinthine instructions. Suffice to say it wasn’t pretty, it led to more sweating, and two long hours later I was no closer to a solution than before.

But having gone through denial and anger I leaped ahead to acceptance: Okay, so I’ll redo some of my bookmarks. How hard could it be? I know how to make a bookmark.

And ordinarily I do. But now I discovered that it was impossible to make any new bookmarks at all. My computer had apparently forgotten how.

Many “how to” webpages later and I remained completely stumped. Meanwhile, I had tried shutting down Firefox and starting it again. No dice.

And then suddenly—when I shut down and started Firefox for the second time—all my old bookmarks appeared. How could this be? Had Firefox not shut down properly the first time? Was it something I did or didn’t do?

Or was it just toying with me?

The little row of icons remains, however. I am trying to adjust to the programmers’ seemingly deep and abiding need for me to learn how to use them.

[NOTE: The title of this piece is a riff on this Coca Cola slogan.]

The post Firefox: the refresh that pauses appeared first on The New Neo.

Also, I’ve got other email addresses (Gmail, for example) and they’ve got their own problems and are no better, just different. With every “improvement” in recent years, each email format has gotten worse. Your mileage may differ, but that’s been my observation. I’m not going to bore you by listing my complaints, but I’ve had a particular beef with the trendy never-ending scroll that long ago replaced pages on Yahoo, and slows loading down to a crawl as well as jumping around.

But much worse is the fact that, after a period of allowing consumers to keep the old format if they wish, there’s a forced change to the new. That forced change is usually preceded by some weeks or months when every single time a person goes to the site he/she is presented with a pop-up asking if the person wants to change to the new, improved email. They’re hoping you say “yes” just out of sheer exhaustion—just to get that pop-up to stop—or that one time you’ll slip up and carelessly and unintentionally activate the new format from which there’s no turning back.

This is the way they currently do it on Yahoo email. The pop-up reads:

It’s time to upgrade your inbox
This version of Yahoo Mail will no longer be available. We encourage you to upgrade to the newest version of Yahoo Mail now.

In other words: we’ll get you sooner or later, so you might as well surrender now and it will be easier for you in the long run. Resistance is futile.

This is followed by the “choice” between two tabs:

Upgrade now / Automatically upgrade next time

Where’s the “never never never upgrade” tab? Yes, I know; that’s not one of your choices.

But each time you see the pop-up, if you keep your wits about you and don’t absent-mindedly click on one of those two ever-so-helpful tabs, you can click on that little “x” in the upper corner and make that little sucker go away. But it’s surprisingly difficult to avoid the blandishments of the tabs, because we do so many things online almost automatically, and the people who design these things know all about how to gently coax you into doing what they want you to do.

So far I’ve stuck to my guns and clicked on that little “x.” But someday that “x” will disappear and the message will just say, “Welcome to the new and improved Yahoo email…” [emphasis mine]”:

Mirrors on the ceiling
The pink champagne on ice
And she said: “We are all just prisoners here
Of our own device”
And in the master’s chambers
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives
But they just can’t kill the beast
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
“Relax,” said the night man
“We are programmed to receive
You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave!”

Note the use of terms such as “device” and “programmed.” Prescient?

The post Yahoo email degenerates further in the name of progress appeared first on The New Neo.

I sent an initial email, discussing the problem briefly and clearly, and I got a stupid boilerplate response that had little to no relation to my complaint. At the end, of course, it politely added, in the modern way of wanting feedback:

I hope you found this information helpful. Please let me know if you have any additional questions.

Best regards…

So I wrote back “No, I did NOT find the information helpful…” and then went into the problem again. This time I got a reply from a supposedly higher-up actual person who asked for some very specific additional information, which I then furnished.

Today I got a reply, which was essentially the same reply as before.

This time I responded even more clearly, with the most important points highlighted in ALL CAPS so that even a bot should be able to SEE THEM.

The modern world—the semblance of service without the actual service at all.

Have a nice day!

The post “Support” can be an Orwellian word appeared first on The New Neo.

Every year around this time I’m busy with my taxes. I like to joke that I may just be the person in the US with the highest ratio of tax complexity to income, because although I don’t make much money I have to fill out a lot of tax forms beyond ye olde 1040.

Self-employed and business owner, with multiple (relatively small) sources of income. Some investments with interest or dividends, a few modest capital gains and losses, and until recently I itemized my deductions. Then there’s the state.

Well you might ask: why not an accountant? I’d be paying quite a bit for not a whole lot, except of course some savings in time and stress. Also (and this may be the real reason), each year I learn (or at least, I think I learn) from the previous one, and each year I think it’ll now be a piece of cake to do this all myself.

It never is a piece of cake. More like chewing on hard crusts of stale bread, over and over and over.

But this year I made a decision. This year I’d buy TurboTax and use that. It made perfect sense. The ads (and even some actual human beings—friends—I talked to) said TurboTax would simplify things mightily and wasn’t very expensive at all. So I decided to do a little research online to decide what version to buy.

Well, it turns out that took a while. Many hours, actually, because first you have to answer some questions, and TurboTax informed me that I needed the most extensive and expensive version, which would be (I’m doing this from memory) something like $119 at the time. That seemed a bit steep, and maybe unnecessary; it was predicated on my being a business owner, but my business taxes are actually a very simple part of the equation for me.

So the next step was seeing what forms are actually supported by the different versions, because I know what forms I need to use. That took me quite some time to find; the information was buried rather effectively, but I finally found it after a rather frustrating search. Turns out that the not-quite-as-complicated and less-expensive version (“Premier”) would do quite nicely for me.

So that was the beginning of my sense of unease about TurboTax and its recommendations. That unease would only increase.

I decided to buy the downloaded version, because it would be a bit more secure. But when I bought it (from Target, which at that moment seemed the cheapest way to go), the website automatically added more sales tax than it should have. The irony was not lost on me: I was trusting TurboTax to be accurate about my federal taxes, but the process had already made an error about sales taxes.

I spent a tedious amount of time trying to correct that error, waiting on hold with Target (or someone somewhere in Asia answering the phone for Target), who ultimately said there was nothing they could do, but would refer me to some other team there. The amount of money involved in the error was relatively small, but by that time I’d worked up quite a head of steam about it, and spent another lengthy time on hold with the new people, who immediately admitted they’d done me wrong.

But they couldn’t fix it, either. They referred it to some other group which supposedly would give me the refund in a week or so. Fine. But I’d already spent approximately four or so hours on things related to TurboTax, and I hadn’t even looked at the actual program yet. How far could I have gotten with my taxes in that amount of time, doing them by myself in the old-fashioned way?

I took the next step, which involved downloading the TurboTax program. It didn’t work. I tried everything I could think of; still didn’t work. I Googled it and read the instructions for if you encounter downloading problems; very complex and still didn’t work.

Now it had been about six hours of wasted time with TurboTax. I wanted a refund, and I had no intention of using the product. So I called Target again, and this time the person who answered the phone (after a long wait) was adamant: TurboTax was not refundable. Period.

I started ranting, or what I’d call ranting. This product was defective. I couldn’t load it. Don’t they stand by their product? The answer was “no.” After quite some time with this, I asked to speak to a higher-up. She refused to connect me. We got into quite a loop; me insisting, she resisting. Finally she said that if she even tried, “they” (the higher-ups) would not accept my call. I got to the point of just repeating “I don’t want to talk to you anymore; connect me to someone else” over and over.

So finally she did, and whoever answered the phone immediately agreed to give me a refund.

Then I took a several-hour break from the whole thing; had to decompress. When I returned to my computer, I found that in the interim my browser had crashed. When the smoke cleared, there on the screen was what had never been there before: “Welcome to TurboTax!” or some such message. The download had been successful; I have no idea how many hours it took, but it was definitely more than one or two.

My faith in the program was nil, but I was curious, so I went a little further. If the upshot was that it seemed to be working well, I’d eat crow, call Target again, and say I didn’t need the refund I’d fought for.

The next step was that I needed to update, said the instructions, even though the thing had just loaded. And then (you may have guessed it) the updates all failed, some of them with big warnings in red saying things like “Critical update failed!”

Not exactly trust-inducing.

Next were some questions. Very elementary questions like—where can last year’s tax return be found on your computer? Well, of course mine wasn’t even on my computer; I’d done it all by hand. But TurboTax, in its less-than-infinite wisdom, didn’t have “nowhere” as a choice. Their assumption was that of course you had your taxes somewhere on your computer; doesn’t everyone? It took some time for me to figure out how to work around that, and then get going with the next few questions.

The next questions were all geared to helping TurboTax figure out what forms I needed, but I already knew exactly what forms I needed, so it all was a waste of time. At this point what was my tally of time wasted with TurboTax—seven hours? eight? I didn’t know for sure, but I knew I’d had enough. And the stress had been greater than the stress of just doing my taxes by myself.

So I uninstalled the program from my computer and called it a day.

There, I feel better now.

My taxes are almost done, in less time than it took me to figure out that TurboTax wasn’t for me. I may even get the completed tax forms sent out before the last possible minute, although last-minute mailings are a personal tradition of mine. But TurboTax will not become one.

The post Me and TurboTax appeared first on The New Neo.