Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

> Workflowy

i hate it already

i know, i really do like it though

lol I've finally gotten used to MS Teams and we've mostly worked out the tech kinks.

has some inferiorities to WebEx that I'll never get over but w/e

Found Teams to be way better than Skype for Business which we were using before. I guess these things in large part depend on what you use them for. For us it's mostly chat and meetings and I find it works better than most other software for this kind of stuff.

lol Skype for Business is a complete garbage fire of a program

or known by its earlier name, Lync

and before that, Office Communicator!

did anybody use Sametime back i nthe day

love sporadically getting “this message can’t be delivered” messages for inexplicable reasons

sometimes Skype for Business would transmit my messages out of order if the server got congested

"The bathroom is overflowing on the third floor"
"Hey, do you have a moment to discuss an issue?"

uhh it works good enough let’s just slap a revised gui on the client and change the name, no one will be the wiser

yeah, for us what happened was that we were told that Skype for Business was what we were going to be using (mostly just for instant messaging, this was pre-pandemic when we did pretty much all meetings in person). A couple of weeks later, somebody figured out that we have Teams included in our Office 365 subscription and everybody just gradually switched to that.

I definitely remember the messages out of order thing. Also that the conversation history would always be missing huge chunks of exchanges.

yup. MS Teams is much better about that

Ok I don't need five different ways to ask someone to give me a piece of information. Every "innovation" so far has just multiplied the ways in which something can go wrong or get missed.

1995: You called me on the phone and I either answered, or I wasn't there so you left a message.

2000: You sent me an email and I either responded, or I didn't, so you sent me another email or you called me on the phone.

2005: You sent me an email and I either did or didn't respond. Then you called me and I did or didn't answer. Then you sent me an IM that I did or didn't answer. You came over to my cubicle and we worked it out.

2010: You sent me an email, sent me a text, called, and IMed me. I either did or didn't respond to those. You walked over to my office and left a Post-it on my monitor.

2020: You sent me an email, sent me a text, called me, IMed me, put a message in the group Teams chat and on our slack channel and our Discord server. I either did or didn't respond to any of those.

All I see in this relentless chain of "progress" is the number of different ways in which I need to ignore someone before it becomes clear that I am, in fact, ignoring them.

you never tried the "Fuck u and take ur needless bullshit down the hallway" reply?

All I see in this relentless chain of "progress" is the number of different ways in which I need to ignore someone before it becomes clear that I am, in fact, ignoring them.

As someone who is often ignored, I agree that this progress is annoying, because it means I have to go through all these different ways to thoroughly attempt communication and can thus document that _I_ was the person doing my job and that my colleague is _the other guy_

Exactly.

Also, like, I'm looking for the email that had the link for the thing I need. Wait no, maybe that reached me via Teams chat? Wait no, maybe they sent me a text. Wait, no, maybe it was in Slack.

Fuck, can't we just go back to email where I can sort by sender and date and search for keywords?

since we're on the subject of work tech -- can I express my annoyance at people who assume I have iMessage and will send me links to files via text, assuming that, I have iMessage and can just open them with my computer

so here's my company's clumsy embrace of technology, if it makes you feel better:

2005 - Sametime = chat client, Lotus Notes = email client. No virtual training, all in-person - few had webcams

2010 - Move from Lotus Notes to Outlook for email. Still using Sametime. virtual training becomes a thing, we use WebEx for it (no webcam, audio only)

2011 - Move from Sametime to Microsoft Lync for chat. However, our seasonal employees inexplicably are given access to Sametime through Citrix, so we have to keep Sametime it and use it for some group chats. So we have to be logged into both clients. (I actually lead the charge on changing this and got a shoutout from one of the GMs for pushing back on the nonsense defense of it)

2013 - Because Microsoft Lync has meeting capability, we're told to use Lync for training, access revoked for WebEx.

2015 - I teach my first domain class, and am told I have to have WebEx to teach it, as this is the preferred client, even though we literally just revoked licenses firmwide. So I have to reapply for a license, now we are leading training in both WebEx (For domain classes) or Lync(for others).

2017ish - sometime or other Lync becomes Skype for Business.

2018 - We are told we are no longer using Skype for Business as chat client and meeting capability licenses will be revoked, we are going to use WebEx Teams, and all training/meetings will be through WebEx Teams by 2019.

2019 - Colleagues stop using Skype, begin using WebEx Teams full time

2020 - Colleagues told we are no longer using WebEx Teams, right as the firm had just finally embraced it, and are going to MS Teams. WebEx Teams not decommissioned until 11/1 so people have been using both.

Game devs used to test games to death before clicking the magic button to go gold and roll out the final no recall disc/cartridge.

The technological advance of high speed connected devices means they just chuck out broken buggy pieces of shit at full price in time for whatever target market they thought they'd be ready for then keep "fixing" them every week until no-one cares or the company dies.

xp wow kind of surprised anyone was still using Lotus Notes in 2010 tbh

love sporadically getting “this message can’t be delivered” messages for inexplicable reasons

Slack's been doing that a fair bit lately

We just switched from Lotus/IBM Notes to Outlook last year. Outlook is soooooo much nicer.

Remember when most websites didn't try to make you sign up or sign in or download their app or accept their cookies? I quickly close like fully 1/3 of the pages I visit these days because they're goddamn intolerable to look at or to navigate through. I almost long for the days of old school, meat & potatoes pop-ups.

2FA woes otm. just logged into my bank...

go to bank website on laptop
enter user serial number
enter security question
unlock phone
start bank app
unlock password safe
copy bank password from password safe
paste bank password in bank app
hit generate secret number
type secret number into bank website

(and i fouled up and generated secret number before i was ready and it's only valid for 20 seconds so had to redo it)

Especially with banking, there are times where I’m just like “I’m insured against theft, just let me into my damned account”

without 2fa i'd never have seen my colleague open his google authenticator app to find the codes for the 5 or 6 websites were all 000 000, try to take a screenshot before they changed, panic and fall off his chair.

work web mail login sends you a text with a number in it to verify yourself. it also times out after 20 minutes. i've had 295 such texts from work in the last 6 months.

mine asks me for the same login code 3 times in a row for some reason.

Theres a related idea that I think about often, about tech we thought we wanted but then discarded - when I was a kid two things that signified Our Amazing Future were video phones and food in pill form. Now we have those things, but if you actually met someone today who was like "I only eat soylent & supplements and only communicate via FaceTime" youd be like wow this person is deeply troubled

― “Hakuna Matata,” a nihilist philosophy (One Eye Open), Wednesday, 14 August 2019 17:54 (one year ago) link

regular-ass cash withdrawal transactions at ATMs take, conservatively, 3 times as long as they did 20 years ago.

Any good video game requires twelve buttons

i have felt that atm one, every time

The heck do you need cash for

tips
the laundromat
little daily purchases at places with a $5 or $10 minimum
little daily purchases where you just wanna get things done quickly
bigger purchases at places that charge you less to pay cash, perhaps in order to cheat on their taxes, perhaps to avoid giving a chunk away to the credit card companies
cash-only stores
cash-only salons
cash-only bars
cash-only restaurants
cash-only food trucks, ice cream trucks, (etc.)
garage sales, flea market booths
underground and informal economies generally
vending machines
pinball machines
tolls

you can do a lot with four american dollars

Hmm I just lead a different lifestyle I guess. Not sure when the last time I encountered a cash-only establishment was. Even Dick’s takes cards now.

Cash-only?

By Christ just how far backwards did trump *take* ye?

I think even sex workers are on Venmo.

shrug idk, i mean obv i haven't been out too much in the past ten months but the phrase "ohhh, we're cash-only...." is one i heard many a time in the ten months before that.

yes, like many people i pay for a handful of goods and services in cash, necessitating the use of the ATM every other month or so.

Idk what ATMs y'all are using but mine are actually faster than they used to be ... and as far as what one uses cash for ... damn, making me remember a year ago when there were shows and bars.

xp silby - my sex worker friend gets paid mostly in cash

I eat money

little daily purchases where you just wanna get things done quickly

still no contactless in the US eh

in canada i can put everything on debit or credit card. there's an option to tip on the device in situations where it's appropriate. even tim hortons finally takes plastic now.

Yeah, cash has basically disappeared from my life and the rare things that still required that (some boulangeries for instance) have all turned to contactless with covid. I'm not even sure I use cash once a year !

Cash-only?

By Christ just how far backwards did trump *take* ye?

Yeah, that's crazy. I'm struggling to process the very concept of a cash only anything. We're fast going in the opposite direction in the UK, of places that don't accept cash at al - I've experienced that once, in a posh bar.

there are places in the US that don't take cash too

there's still a few cash-only pubs in Dublin

but they're doing it out of a sort of performative Luddism

I need 50p to put air in my tyres and the logistics of actually getting a 50p-piece seem impossibly baroque.