Friday 5 December 2014

Could someone please explain

why internet service providers, computer programmers, technicians, boffins, geeks and sundry other individuals believe you need to "upgrade" an operating system which works well and is not bringing in any new device or adaptation? Please? Please?
I could not get the e-mail function to work yesterday. (I am on Office 2010 in case anyone is interested.)
Now e-mail is important to me. My work comes in through e-mail and I work from home. I download the mail first thing and then work my way through it during the day. A few more items might come in during the day but the bulk of it is there first thing and I can start work when I am ready - often at about 5:30am. I can usually deal with the most urgent things then. I fit the household tasks in around dealing with the rest of the list during the day.
It is a system which works fairly well - provided that the computer is working and the e-mail is functioning as it should.
Yesterday my ISP people decided that something needed to be changed. I don't understand the technicalities. The old system was working very well but this was an "upgrade". The e-mail went down. Nothing I could do - even a couple of "tweets" for help to the ISP people - worked. The web-mail (that is the mail through the ISP site) was working so I tried reloading the programme again thinking that had to be the problem. It wasn't.
I downloaded another e-mail programme which is not my preferred way of doing things as there might be security issues I am unaware of - important in my line of work. That worked.
I thought it had to be a major problem with Office. Sigh... it had taken me a couple of precious hours to try and sort the situation out. (Yes, I know other people would do this without any problem but I am NOT a computer geek.)
I eventually gave up trying to do anything except finish my work for the day in a rather more awkward way.
This morning, not very hopefully, I clicked on Office - and it came up. It seems to be working perfectly well. (And yes, I had earlier tried turning the computer off and on again - more than once.) So, what happened?
There is only one explanation for all this - somewhere at the other end of the system one of those ISP technicians found the plea I sent and realised that the problem really was at their end after all. They have fixed it but they will never admit that they failed to catch the ball and had to run to the outfield, pick it up from a ditch filled with mud and wipe it clean before throwing it back.
I hope the ball stays clean!

5 comments:

Philip C James said...

I sympathise.

Tech support can be as user-unfriendly as the developers who thrust a spanking new bells-n-whistles program on one.

It's an "age old" problem (relatively, ie, within the time frame of 70 years since computing got going). I'm old enough to remember this definition:

"TURN AROUND TIME: The time between the dispatch of your punched cards to the computing department and the return of their remains."

My personal bugbear is operating system security updates. I fear their primary purpose is to improve sales of the NEXT version of a company's operating system. If sales are lagging, introduce a few delay loops into the previous version of the OS, ostensibly as a 'security update'. Keep doing it until even the die-hard advocates of OS v.(N-1) give up and migrate to OS v.N...

catdownunder said...

I am so glad someone understands!

jeanfromcornwall said...

Forgot to leave this yesterday - my son reckons the general policy of these companies is "If it ain't broke, keep fixing it until it is."

catdownunder said...

That is absolutely so true Jean!

Anonymous said...

Jean's son put it so well!