Do you remember the t.v. commercial for the "new and improved" whatever-it-whats-its"? Like laundry detergent, cold medicine, fabrics? Somehow or another, they never worked as well as the old ones? The same thing is happening with our computers.
There's way too much "upgrade and update" going on and it's causing quite a mess on this supposed information superhighway. It's not what I was going to write about today, but after going thru all this, I'm sure I don't recall what I did want to say. It wasn't about computers, or even the upcoming elections. I think it was going to be about jewelry. What do computers and jewelry have in common?
If the mode of transport to the store is your computer, beware. It has a nasty habit of not completely finishing your payment processing. So your order is stuck in limbo and you have no way to get it out. Try using the customer service system on ebay. Good luck. After a week or so, you might get to talk to someone. The individual merchants are much faster in replying and I can get something here from China faster than I can get it released from jtv. For what reason? JTV says credit card orders take ten days to two weeks to process. I knew something was wrong there, because in between I've ordered and received my merchandise from Hong Kong.
There's a nasty litttle pop-up from bizrate or whatever that keeps popping into my checkout sequence. If it happens to you, ignore it. They're trying to get your financial information under the guise "This order qualifies you for a $100. reward". Right. After they have you take a survey they claim is for JTV, they tru to sell ("give")you magazines for a $2.00 processing fee. A whole six bucks is what you'll pay, but the trick is that they now want you to give them your financial information so you can get your "free gift." Are any of us still that stupid? I hope not.
Internet Explorer has a nasty habit of aborting the entire checkout process when it says "Internet Explorer has blocked this website from displaying all content due to security certificate errors. Click here for options..." You click there and the page disappears. We need some heavy duty cyber-cops on Internet Explorer as well as any high volume sites which may be subjected to raiders. If the crooks spent as much brainpower improving the world as they do on defrauding it, things might change for the better. They might even find their minds occupied by something better than giving everybody else "the screw".
I can't believe I actually had to say to a supplier that if the goods were picked over when they got here, they're going back. No, I don't trust the warehouse & shipping crews. I've been out in the world too long to think they can be trusted. Especially when recently I got into a conversation with two ladies in the local Wal-Mart who told me I wouldn't believe if they said.
What they said was that the security people in a certain store were "setting up" employees to get busted by planting things in their pocket books and going thru their lockers(now there's a corrupted crime scene and should be thrown out of court)and diverting attention in that way from what was really going on. What was really going on was the security and warehouse people were once again doing as others I know of without a doubt have done:diverting (stealing)entire truck trailers full of merchandise to their own special depots. It was 1973 when I heard of the first incident. It is now 2010.
Perhaps some things never change in this world, but for sure, it's much easier now than ever to lose the paperwork in the cyberjungle. Truckloads of merchandise, medical records, financial records and IRS data. I've been around those blocks for my Dad an awful lot these past three years. He at least is fairly stable now whereas I am a fottstep away from being stuck in bed for a week. And an unnavigatable communications system doesn't help. My spine does not have an unbroken part in it. There isn't a day that I'm not in pain. And now computer programmers have deemed themselves "engineers". But what are they building other than something that would give Rube Goldberg nightmares? Not buildings or bridges r tunnels that people actually use. And if you live in New Jersey, please back Sen. Lautenberg in demanding the tunnell project and the elction results be gone over manually with a fine toothed comb.
Well, maybe one day it will all just cancel each other out and we can return to the world as we knew it: out, talking to other people, making deals face to face. But then, how would I be able to get things from China? Or track things from the moment they're shipped til they're in the mail carrier's truck? Some things were done right. Don't "new and imrpove" what doesn't need changing.
