Little Things That Piss Me Off

You probably don't really care what is pissing me off, but why can't big, rich companies solve old, small problems with their products?

If I know myself, I’ll keep adding to these items as time goes by. I’ve been writing about technology for 45 years, and I’ve learned that this is a persistent theme in my life: Technology really pisses me off. I consider it a sign of disrespect to those companies’ customers that they can’t manage their own products. Consider this Pissed List the modern version of my Vapor List.

7/18/2021: Stupid statements like this: “We are always here to help. For any questions, please visit our Help Center for more information.” This from Disney+, which charged the wrong card for a $29.99 supplement so that I could stream Black Widow, rather than seeing it for $14 in the theater. Charging 30 bucks extra to stream the movie (independent of whether it’s worth watching in the first place) is annoying enough, but then saying they are ALWAYS available? I clicked through, searched for “change credit card”, and was linked to a pitch for something called The Disney Bundle. 🤷🏻‍♂️ I gave up.

United Airlines: On hold for an estimated 25-30 minutes to update an Unaccompanied Minor Reservation for my grandson to come visit, for which there is NO alternative to talking to a human being. The airline still views on-hold time as an opportunity to sell me something and play horrible music in between (which playing right now so I can’t listen to something else while waiting). Why can’t they give me the option of turning off the hold music?) Interim update: Still on hold at 32 minutes; how long do you think it will take to get off hold? 😂 (It was one hour and 32 minutes, but they did answer!)

Why can’t Apple Inc. put my media purchases and my product purchases in one place and list them the way normal companies do, in a row and column format? Instead, it makes you go to two different applications, one on your device and one on the internet and then list the purchases in different formats, so that you have to remember how to use each one every time you go back. I don’t go back more than every month, so I can’t remember and have to search for how to get to each site every time. Isn’t the company that prides itself on user-friendly experiences? What, that doesn’t apply to their accounting department?

This was mailed about six weeks before the wedding and delivered two weeks after! The address is perfect. Can anyone guess what the yellow sticker means?

USPS is marking my deliveries and mail as “unable to forward/for review” about 30% of the time, eve though the address is correct and the other 70% actually get delivered on time. The deliveries are returned (usually to Amazon, which refunds the cost of the product automatically) and most of the letter mail is delayed by more than a month. One really unique experience lead the USPS to forward an order I made for socks from Bombas to my daughter in Berkeley (different name and state!) In another, the USPS returned the expiration sticker for my license plates to the New Mexico MVD (Motor Vehicle Division), which is an organization that does not respond to phone calls or emails; so I went to the MVD Express office, got in line, and paid $44.03 (including a $33.99 convenience fee!) to get the new renewal expiration sticker, not even new plates, just the little sticker that says what month my registration expires! Prop!: Just to give MVD Express credit, however, it has instituted a text-notification system that took less than 15 minutes to alert me when my turn came up. Meanwhile, I was able to sit in my car and eat my lunch. Most efficient system I’ve seen for dreaded DMV interactions! Remember this is about USPS being unable to deliver packages, even in good weather! Former Motto: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” Any ideas for a new motto for USPS?

Before June 30, 2021: Amazon changed its order notifications so that they don’t notify you about anything more than that you ordered something and now have a tracking number. Indeed, to find out what is being shipped, you have to click through to see the item. If, like me (and, what, hundreds of millions of other people who are members of Amazon Prime?), you might order more than one thing at a time (shipping is free, so what the heck?) Remember that whole Day Zero customer-first thing that Amazon (or at least Jeff Bezos) is famous for? Why the heck would they tell you they are shipping a product without telling you what they are shipping? I suspect it is because they sell advertising now; making you click through creates more ad inventory. Profit before customer. Beginning of end.

Microsoft has been producing some version of Outlook since 1997, 24 years. Still today, the program is not smart enough to format telephone numbers and insists on labeling each number from a pick-list of archaic terms like “fax”, “office”, “pager”, “car phone”, etc. It’s a pretty simple matter to make the label a customer-defined field, so you could write in “Wife’s Phone”, “The Devil”, “iPhone” or whatever, type the numbers, and have it be automatically formatted. What? There is no single individual in the Outlook dev group at Microsoft who can figure that out?

Apple still makes all contacts in its Contacts app default to “Home…” phone, address, etc. About 80% of my contacts are work or business information, with the home information as the exception. I keep wondering if Apple (you know, the 150,000 people who work directly for the company) all think they are still in the Home Computer business? (At least Apple can format phone numbers for the U.S.!)

If you go out of cell range, Apple iMessage converts to plain text and gives a “failed to send” message. Once you get back in cell range, it catches up by sending your message as a text. And tells you when you received it, not when it was sent. This is not useful.

For about a year, every time I opened the Sonos S1 app, it told me that Sonos S2 is “now” available. After a while, someone at Sonos noticed that the word “now” means “at the present time or moment”, and the company has since changed the app’s naming (now just Sonos) and notifications.

Everyone loves to complain about Twitter, so here goes: Why does the company make it SO hard to reject followers? Back in the day (and I don’t mind saying that I got my Twitter account in April, 2007, 14 years ago; I think I was #17,000), I followed everybody that looked remotely interesting, shared my tweets aggressively, and ended up getting followed by more than 14,000 people. (It helped when @ElonMusk decided to ban me from Tesla, since he’s genuinely famous and followed by millions.) That felt good. Now, not so much. When I post on Twitter, I might get one re-tweet (if it’s a good one) and one or two likes. What the heck happened to the other 13,950 followers? I don’t think they died, but maybe they stopped using Twitter. I would like to remove those inactive accounts (i.e. people who have not tweeted in, say, more than a year) as followers of my account. Why does Twitter think they are so important that I can only remove them one at a time? By the way, and this is a topic for a whole newsletter but might be related, I stopped looking at Twitter about three weeks ago.