Need to do one simple thing on your computer and end up spending all day doing computer updates and installs?
And then get almost nothing actually done, including that one simple thing? Because that’s me today.
Archive for the ‘Rant Alert’ Category
Did You Ever?
Sunday, September 30th, 2018
Customer Service – A Rant
Sunday, August 26th, 2018If you’re reading this, congratulations to us all because it means my move to a new webhost was successful. I’d been with my previous webhost for over ten years and they were really stellar. If there was a problem it got fixed quickly and courteously. I feel it’s not unrelated, given the story I’m about to tell you, that the person who handled most of the issues I had was a woman who recently left that company.
I was surprised when the security certificate on my site didn’t/couldn’t renew. I contacted my host about why it hadn’t renewed and the response was “You don’t need a cert because you don’t sell anything on your website.”
Notice that this does not respond in any way to my request. Note as well that the customer service rep is wrong. Deeply wrong, in fact.
For the last two years at least Google has been downranking websites that don’t run on SSL (That is, has a security certificate and is https:// rather than http://) and by now users are seeing warnings when they land on a site that isn’t running on SSL. Not to mention an expired cert will cause all kinds of problems for a website.
This is an experience women have all the time. They get worse customer service and more roadblocks in the way of that service. I opened a ticket about why an existing cert hadn’t renewed and the answer to me, someone with an obviously female name, was to question my need for a service I was using. At every step, in fact, my issues were not taken seriously.
On top of this add that these tech support people did not understand certs and how their backend requires they be set up for the customer, and the problem is even worse.
What’s in a Name? Customer Service
The short version of this tale is that I spent from the 14th to 20th explaining over and over what they needed to do and telling them that their changes actually made things worse and had ended up breaking my email. There was a string of responses over those days that were all basically, we fixed this, please reply to the cert email we are sending you, an email I was not getting (if they were actually sending it which I doubt because they were doing it wrong) because they broke my email. And if was wasn’t that, it was, please send us the error messages and tell us exactly what the problem is and I kept saying, OK, but look at in the thread of this ticket where I already did that, but here it is AGAIN.
Carolyn Not Charles
It was worse than that, way worse. And I’m just going to say that if my name was Charles Jewel my cert would have been renewed on the first day and I would still be their customer.
Mind The Gap
Friday, November 24th, 2017There is a happy ending to my story so I’m able to tell you about the nightmare of the past 12 hours. Being the geek that I am, I have an iPhone X. In fact, it arrived just this Tuesday, so on Thursday, my phone (which I LOVE so far) still had that new phone smell. Folks, the iPhone X is a religious experience for me. I really, really, really like this phone.
Thursday evening I was getting in the car for a short but necessary drive, and I put my phone down in the center console near the middle of the seat. Only the phone slipped into the gap between the seat and the side of the console and then slid completely out of sight. Completely. It was NOT underneath the seat. After 45 minutes of me, my son, and my sister trying to even see where it was and get it out, we failed. I resigned myself to having to go to my mechanic to have the front seat removed in order to retrieve the phone from the innards of the driver’s seat.
Important note: my son insisted that the phone was underneath the center console. To which I replied, “No, it can’t be. I saw it slide underneath the seat.” In the opposite direction.
My phone and I were forced to spend the night apart for the first time in our nascent relationship. The horror. Also, the horror of realizing that I would not be able to easily access any of the sites where I have enabled 2-Factor Authentication and ACK HOW DOES ANYONE FUNCTION WITHOUT A PHONE?????
This morning, I had to call ON A LAND LINE— what even is that? —to tell my mechanic that I had a car emergency and to be prepared for my immanent arrival. I then drove immediately there. Two people tried to find my phone. We were about to set about removing the front seat when a third person said he’d try, and after calling my phone several times he too said the phone was under the center console. He fetched a thingamajig and two minutes later he handed me my phone. They didn’t even charge me.
I HAVE MY LIFE BACK!!!
When I got home, I stuffed some cloth in the gap so if this happens again, me being somewhat klutzy, the phone will not slip down like that.
When my son gets up, I will tell him that he was right, and I was wrong, and I don’t even care because I have my phone back, and besides, you have to admit when you’re wrong like that.
Who Gets to Talk
Sunday, December 11th, 2016So, the other day, Richard Spencer, whose goal is to one day have a Whites only State, had his Twitter account reinstated and verified by Twitter. Let’s be blunt, since I get to talk here in this space; Spencer is a White Supremacist. His views are hateful and vile. In the US, with certain narrow exceptions, the government cannot interfere with his right to say vile things.
Twitter has always said they value free speech. Even speech that others don’t like. Twitter is not the government, however. It’s their platform, and they get to set the rules of engagement. Twitter recently shut down ISIS related accounts. I’ve not heard they’ve been reinstated and verified.
What Twitter has done is say that this white male voice counts more than all the voices that have been and will be silenced or driven off the platform. They’d rather let this man speak than all the others Spencer and people like him target.
This isn’t an isolated experience.
Woman after woman after woman after woman, especially women of color, have been and are currently silenced because Twitter allows accounts that spew hatred to continue spewing hatred. They do this without giving the targets of that hated any tool to stay safe on Twitter or in their real lives.
Right now, there are a bunch of righteous white men at Twitter going, yeah, he’s vile, but he gets to speak! Free speech!
They say that because they’re part of the problem. They can’t hear women and people of color. They never have. They don’t hire these voices (because MERITOCRACY!!). And if somehow they do, they don’t listen to them.
Twitter gave Spencer back his voice back because the white men of Twitter, quite literally, cannot hear all the voices their policies and inaction have silenced. They think they’ve make a difficult decision to allow a man to voice his hatred. At twitter, one white man still counts more than a person of color or a woman.
If that weren’t true, there’d be effective tools for the targets of hate speech to keep their voices and their safety.
Penguin
Sunday, November 6th, 2016So, I saw the penguin video,* which depicts penguins fighting for the right to perpetuate the species.
I am totally cool with the nature thing of penguins. The narration, however, is NOT a nature thing. The narration is exactly the kind of bullshit that reinforces the message that male humans have a right to female humans and that violence is A-OK in enforcing that right.
Because lookit. Penguins are not people. They do not live by the norms of human culture. The female penguin wasn’t anybody’s wife. Male Penguin No 1 was not her husband. In fact, that male penguin had exactly ZERO right to the female penguin. ZERO.
Allow me to provide a different script:
Here is a female penguin with a Hot Stuff male penguin she believes is way more likely to be right for raising the kids successfully than the loser she used to be with. OH NO!!! Here comes that loser asshole male penguin No 1 who was such a major mistake. Now hot stuff and asshole are fighting! Wow. That is a lot of blood, but when a female penguin finds a better mate, an asshole’s gonna be an asshole and someone’s gonna lose.
I submit that this is an equally valid narration to what National Geographic supplied.
Thank you.
*Google Penguin Video, but be warned it’s bloody with bonus human misogyny
Period
Saturday, October 29th, 2016So there I was on my lunch hour revising a scene in the MS when I suddenly needed to know a bit more about what women used when they had their periods. (This is for Surrender to Ruin, a historical romance, fyi). I had some ideas, but it’s always nice to do some research on such points. So off to Google I went. Fairly quickly, and not unexpectedly, I found that documentation is somewhat sparse.
This should be obvious to you-all, right? Not only is this a 100% female related event, but no one wrote much about going to the toilet etc. We know something about what people used for toilet paper in the Medieval era because there are a few places where conditions ended up preserving the material — moss, for example. But it’s not something people wrote down and then saved for posterity. I did not expect to come across copious documentation.
But I did expect to find some scholarly speculation. My quick and dirty research came to a quick halt when I came across this article about what American and European woman might have done historically. Why this would be materially different from what women all over the world have done, I’m not sure, but people specialize in all sorts of arcane areas.
The author notes that ancient Egyptians made tampons and mentions evidence in other countries that women used rags and other materials such as sheep wool wrapped in cloth. So far I was thinking, yeah. This sounds totally reasonable. Some of this evidence includes European women. And then the author says:
“Read why I have concluded, in May 2001, that most European and American women probably used nothing at all, bleeding into their clothing.”
Here is a representation of my reaction:
What????
The article gets even more ridiculous. Apparently, several woman contacted him to relate their actual personal knowledge of what their relatives did, many of said relatives having been born in the late 1800’s. Some of those people were actual historians with actual evidence. Those emails are posted, along with rebuttals.
Rebuttals. Please go on. Tell us more about your theory that defies logic and actual experience of the subject matter.
My suspicion that the author had never had a period turned out to be correct. The author is a man. And in epic fashion, he has decided that he, a person who has never menstruated, can deduce what women did and to hell with all historical evidence and the women who basically said a nice version of “You are an idiot, and here is why.”
No woman would decide she’d just bleed into her clothes, particularly when the vast majority of women would not have been able to afford to replace their clothing that often. There would be evidence of blood-stained clothing. There would be references to the epic consumption of shifts among the female population. There would be references to monthly replacements of mattresses among those who could afford them.
As a person who has personally experienced periods, I can say with 100% confidence that no woman would just bleed into her clothes as a matter of course. It’s just so ignorant and insulting. I can’t even.
I will leave you with one of my favorite videos by one of my favorite YouTubers, Sabrina, of Nerdy and Quirky, in which she addresses the subject of period euphemisms. Enjoy.
The Disguise of Author Services
Sunday, October 2nd, 2016Here’s what I’m starting to dread and despise. I hear an interview with an author of fiction, and talk about their fiction etc and what they did to publish and market. And then there’s something along the lines of “Oh, and I put together this free resource, go here to check it out!”
And you do, and every damn one follows the same website format. A long, long, long, long page where you keep getting a bunch of marketing language, usually with big bright arrows and buttons, and all you really want to know is where you can get the material promised at the website/interview, which eventually you do get, along with the requirement that you turn over your email and HEY, HERE’S SOME PAID CONTENT where I tell more more stuff.
And then the content you were promised is really nothing that any reasonably informed author doesn’t already know. And ALL THESE GUYS — because they’re all guys, it turns out, actually got their start in non-fiction of some vague business-y content, and if they write fiction, they often won’t reveal the name their fiction is written under — OR they won’t reveal the name their non-fiction is under.
Because their real business is selling “self-help” which is either completely inappropriate for fiction or is something every dialed in romance author already knows. You have to have a great cover!!! OMG. WHO FUCKING COULD EVER HAVE GUESSED THAT!!!! You have to use the right keywords. Like some how that’s the formula for cold fusion which you can ONLY get from them because they are being so generous. You need a great cover blurb! Really? Like that isn’t obvious? You need reviews! And on and on and on and just shut up already.
And then it starts to turn out that all these guys know each other from before they started writing fiction/selling self-help to authors.
And I am just really cynical now and it makes me want to cry. That’s all.
Harlequin is a Publisher of Books not an Attribute of The Uterus
Sunday, August 7th, 2016Sally Jenkins over at the Wapo just blew my mind with this article about the 2016 Summer Olympics. The minute I read about NBC’s plan to time delay on the west coast (where I happen to live) I knew I wouldn’t bother watching. I was already pretty sure I wouldn’t because the last few Olympics I’ve been all “Where’s The Sports??”
Did I mention that I read Romance novels? Yeah. I write them, too. Just putting that out there.
I can get Olympic results for all the sports on twitter. I wish those tweets came with video because I would click the hell out of those. I love the Olympics. I even like lots of sports. True, I’m not a nutso fan of ALL the sports, but I do enjoy watching the very best compete in most all the sports.
The Olden Days, When the Olympics were Manly
Way back in olden times, when I lived in Berkeley and cable TV was brand new and cost me $10 a month, the Olympics came along, as they do, and they had this package where for some amount affordable for me, as a single lady underpaid in her job because, hey, lady person! (words overheard just prior to my leaving the then current job “We can’t pay [male person in a significantly junior position] you more than the lowest paid senior person.” And then my salary got named. Apparently they were later shocked that I was upset by being the lowest paid person and even more upset that I quit. Why didn’t I just ask for a raise? Well, to me, why didn’t you decide you should better compensate your lowest paid but highest performing person? To me, you don’t get to keep employees you fuck over like that. But I digress. One more digression. My office was right outside the men’s room and I was regularly treated to hallway conversations about blow jobs and discussions of the attributes of female employees. Apparently, they thought I was deaf.)
Please sir, may I have another insult?
Anyway I signed up for the Olympics plan way back because you could watch EVERYTHING LIVE and then again later when it was re-broadcast in a West Coast time zone. It was awesome. I watched all kinds of sports. Live and rebroadcast because a girl’s gotta sleep, right? And read and write romance.
And now, Sally Jenkins and the folks over at NBC are at last correcting me of my love of actually watching Olympic events and reading and writing Romance. I did not know those two things were mutually exclusive. I did not know that if you read and write Romance you are, de facto, not a sports fan who we all know would never ever in a million years enjoy romance reading, so the only way to show me and other lady folks the Olympics is to pretend the Olympics is a romance novel without the need to show any sports hardly.
Because, am I right? Romance reading is so horrible and readers of Romance are such an inferior class of lady persons, and are so incompatible with anything like sports and the Olympics that when you’re trying to point out how badly NBC is fucking this up for everyone and especially women athletes that Romance readers are TOTALLY the correct simile here.
Romance reading = HORRIBLE STUPID NO ONE WANTS SPORTS IN THEIR STORIES. EWW!
NBC is trying to Romancify the Olympics OMG.
Harlequin is a Publisher of Books not an Attribute of The Uterus
The use of the word “Harlequin” as your straw man, oops! Straw lady, is the first sign that you have failed the intellectual rigor test of your comparison.
Here. Let me fix your complaint about NBC so it works.
NBC is pandering to what men WISH was true about women. That wish is based on stereotype, misogyny, and cliche. There is nothing in NBC’s programming anywhere that suggests they understand what kind of programming women would actually like to see. Women viewers, even viewers who read and write Romance, are also actual sports fans who would like to see actual sports in the Olympics and we would also like to see the female athletes treated in a manner that respects their personhood and their athletic achievements.
The only connection to Romance novels is in the minds of the idiots at NBC and, apparently, Sally Jenkins.
I Call Bullshit
Thursday, November 19th, 2015Surfacing from mad revisions for this:
I got an email today from a fairly large site that does book related stuff. They are very very large and are supposed to provide author services. The email included this:
[A woman’s first name] was able to get 100,000 new readers for her book in those 6 months. Now she has over 80 reviews on Amazon and her book is doing well.
Blah blah blah. Send us money.
Right. Someone who has 100,000 NEW READERS
1. Made a list
2. Has a lot more than 80 Amazon reviews.
I really hate when companies look at authors, see dollar signs and decide to fleece the stupid ones.
Because that statement is a LIE.
Technology Woes . . . My Sob Story
Tuesday, October 20th, 2015So, a couple of days ago my 2011 model iMac began misbehaving in a worrisome way. I got the soonest Genius Bar appointment possible and it was still too late. Yesterday it basically died. Yesterday was the same day my replacement phone arrived and with the dead iMac, my phone backup was unavailable. Because of our internet situation here (only recently resolved mostly) I never dared back up to iCloud. Not possible. So… I backed up the phone to my Macbook and for some reason it would only encrypt the backup but without ever asking me to give it a password. NEVER HAPPENED. And it wanted this nonexistent password in order to restore my backup to the new phone.
The workaround is a backup to iCloud. So, OK. Our internet is OK enough to risk it. I started at 7:00PM and at 4:30 this morning it was still going. And at 5:30 it just quit. No error message. No nothing. Just “Your backup could not be completed” or else, no message at all. So I took it to work and tried a backup to a Windows machine. Same thing. Encrypted backup. NO opportunity to give a password. I tried iCloud again. Nope.
Finally, the nice lady at Apple wondered if I had enough space in iCloud. Well, I had no idea how big the phone backup is. Apple doesn’t tell you.
Long story short, the answer is no. Apple just swallows a “you don’t have enough space” error message and misses the upsell opportunity too.
Then I got the extra storage and that took two hours for the phone to believe I had it, and THEN the backup succeeded.
THEN the restore was stuck on “1 hour remaining” for three hours.
I went to my other office where they have super duper internet and started over with the restore and it took 20 minutes. TWENTY MINUTES!!!!!
JFC.
This was nothing but a series of error conditions that Apple should be trapping. I have suspicions about the backup though. And since I will be back on the phone with them tomorrow to explain my resolution and complain a bit, I’ll relay the possibility that iPhone encrypted backup process doesn’t work when the drive is already encrypted.
::Sigh::
Anyway, My Demon Warlord is going well. I’m doing the final paper read-through so the dead iMac could be worse.