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

xpost lol I'm the "go to FedEx Office to print one page of a ticket" guy. and I *have* a printer that I"m just lazy about refilling ink on

course outside the US idk how prevalent those types of places are.

Portuguese govt so app-obsessed that at one point there was a plan to make the covid app *mandatory*, the govt having seemingly forgotten that it's an aging population and tons of ppl don't actually have a smartphone

ran into that same bullshit at work recently, which I posted in the stupid annoying co-workers thread, where the new "unplanned absences" line is actually a smart phone app where you can request your absence by phone.

a few people complained they didn't have smart phones and were told they needed to just "tell their manager they were out", which definitely created a less equal environment for them, so I reported it to HR.

apparently the compromise was...

...now the people who use the app also have to tell their manager they're going to be absent in addition to using the app.

Yes, because that was the smart solution, not, idk, making it possible to do on your work assigned laptop, which is equipment the company KNOWS you have, that you could sign into surreptitiously without anybody knowing you're online. No, the solution is now, we make everybody tell their manager they're going to be out, somewhat negating the purpose of the app to begin with.

which is an option (which they need to have, a lot of the island doesn't have reliable cell service)

I don't know how it is where you are, but here (Quebec) the app just shows an image of the QR code and doesn't require any online access. Having the the PDF with the QR code downloaded and showing that works just as well (just a bit less convenient).

Anyway, I need to get around to printing my QR code as I'm the type of person who will occasionally either forget to charge my phone or forget my phone at home.

also Ticketmaster right now has no live support available. they claim this is due to the pandemic and "being short-staffed", which is of course code for "we can't figure out why nobody wants to work 60 hour weeks for $9/hour".

so if you for some reason have an issue with a ticket to an event that is coming up within the next few days, getting in touch with people = sending them an email, or a DM via Twitter. Usually if you send it by 9 am, you get a reply at like 5 pm.

if you have a PHYSICAL ticket that was destroyed or lost, they will overnight it to you, but because of how compartmentalized the communication process is, the mail room may or may not leave your apartment number off and the overnight delivery fails as a result.

xp Yes same. They say the code app and the app that scans them don't need to be online. I threw the PDFs on my phone just in case. And i spose I've made a petty good argument now for there being an app cuz who's manually putting a PDF on their phone.

There was chatter of an optional step of uploading your, like, driver's license to the app, that went away. Probably realized what a honeypot they'd be creating for no good reason.

stop hiding sudafed behind the window you cowards

my fat arthritic fingers simply cannot type on a phone screen keyboard without many mistakes and autocorrect doesn't help, but there is apparently no solution available for this. mechanical keyboards on phones worked great for me. if I could just type a space without it being a full stop or an 'a' without it giving me a 'q' that would be something.

between autosuggest and the voice to text thing, people regularly end up sending additional texts or emails to correct or clarify things from their first message

stop hiding sudafed behind the window you cowards

― When Young Sheldon began to rap (forksclovetofu), Sunday, October 24, 2021 11:24 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Meth is a hell of a drug. Even one less tweaker is enough to justify keeping the sudafed behind glass.

The Kennedy Center has ditched printed programs and now we have to look at our phones all through a concert now if we want to know what is being played or to read the libretto translation.

lol that’s such a hilariously bad idea

Them programmes earn a fortune, don’t they?

between autosuggest and the voice to text thing, people regularly end up sending additional texts or emails to correct or clarify things from their first message

― sarahell, Sunday, 24 October 2021 18:54 (two days ago) link

This drives me nuts - when I do afterschool pickup of my kids I'm supposed to text the counselors to bring my kids out. I like to text as I'm first approaching the school campus, because it takes them a while to come out. But voice to text cannot get my kids' names right.

Sometimes it doesn't even hear them as two names and just runs them together into some other name.

Them programmes earn a fortune, don’t they?

? At KenCen particularly, they're chock-full of ads for pre- and post-theater dining. Appeals for donations. etc.

Paper and printing aren't that expensive, really, compared to the ad revenue.

I figured it was a COVID measure: fewer face-to-face contacts for ushers handing out programs.

I did theater publicity in a past life, and have been a regular theatergoer forever - programs are a pet peeve of mine. Mainly because they tend to hold very little information relevant to that night's performance, and huge amounts of information about other productions, upcoming productions, past productions, lists of benefactors, and advertising. When it's been my job I dutifully did layout, editing, and managed print production, but generally I only keep the cover as a keepsake and jettison the rest.

Streamlining it to just what one wants to know is a great idea: What pieces are they playing? How many movements? When do I clap? What are the fucking words to this song in a foreign language? How long till intermission so I can pee and get a chardonnay? Who is the oboe soloist? Where have I seen that actor before?

Unfortunately, that seems like a great thing to just have a QR code for - rather than killing a half-forest of trees and generating tons of paper waste to impart small amounts of essential information.

But the downside is as Boring MD notes: it's distracting as fuck to have a concert hall full of people looking down at glowing rectangles in their laps. Kills the mood. And it must be SO TEMPTING if you're already looking at your phone to just, y'know, respond to a text or an email during the boring (no pun intended) slog of the dumb Mahler thing when you just them to get to the Brahms.

From there, it's a short hop to people playing Candy Crush during Carmen. Which is kinda the opposite of what KenCen presumably wants.

Sorry, I am still working out my thoughts here. Again, like 90% of programs are glanced at for a few minutes, then tossed. An environmental nightmare.

An online restaurant menu makes some sense in COVID time. They don't need to continually revise and print paper menus that are handled briefly then tossed. Most people make up their minds quickly and order and move on.

But a concert program, hmmm. Some people very much want to have them as souvenirs. Some people really want to browse through the Playbill capsule bios or read the interview with the sound designer or whatever. Most people don't. So why print up one per theatergoer? Maybe make them request-only? Print-on-demand if you start to run out?

mention of Candy Crush unearths an oddly clear-as-a-bell memory of my very endearing undergrad Music Appreciation teacher, on a mild tangent about the small annoyances of concertgoing, and how "there's always someone opening a bit of candy during a quiet passage."

i would argue the online restaurant menus are worse, because you actually need the menu to order food, so you're SOL if your phone doesn't support the technology, or your phone is dead, or you can't get reception, or (shock) you deliberately chose to leave the house without your phone attached to your body. see previous griping starting at this permalink. that was back in march! i think we're all ready to have paper menus back, please.

fuck a QR code in any situation

i used one today, first time in ages, to set up 2fa login with google authenticator.

When it's been my job I dutifully did layout, editing, and managed print production, but generally I only keep the cover as a keepsake and jettison the rest.

Streamlining it to just what one wants to know is a great idea: What pieces are they playing? How many movements? When do I clap? What are the fucking words to this song in a foreign language? How long till intermission so I can pee and get a chardonnay? Who is the oboe soloist? Where have I seen that actor before?

I did the programs for a smaller presenting org, and our programs were all this information and very little else.

Some people really want to browse through the Playbill capsule bios or read the interview with the sound designer or whatever. Most people don't. So why print up one per theatergoer? Maybe make them request-only?

yes, I think there should be programs for people who want them, but there always were way too many printed. I think one year when I was doing programs, I printed a smaller number, and then collected the programs left after a performance and then put them at the bottom of the stack of programs to hand out the next night.

I printed a smaller number, and then collected the programs left after a performance and then put them at the bottom of the stack of programs to hand out the next night

Yes, this is the thing to do

If they want digital menus they should have some kind of dedicated screen(s) at the table that are well suited for that. Hate trying to read the tiny menu on my phone.

Speaking of which, those LED screen menus a lot of places have now that keep cycling through several different slides so it takes forever to read the menu and figure out what you want.

this isn't so much due to technology, but a poorly mapped out process that technology enabled. I just want you all to marvel at the bad design of this process.
-----------------------------------------

so at work, our customer care agents' tickets have to be escalated because if their headset doesn't work or they've lost access to a program, that inhibits their ability to take calls (or if they're in training, actually learn). So there has been a standing MS Teams chat where managers can post the ticket numbers so IT can escalate or give quick updates to them.

Every year, some of our teams go through Annual Enrollment and we hire seasonal representatives through partner sites. They decided, foolishly, to separate this into a separate MS Teams chat. so issues with permanent agents would go in one chat, issues with seasonal agents would go in the other. and of course you'd get a stern correction if you made a mistake.

This was the case for several months and everybody more or less fell in line. Inexplicably, a week or two ago, the IT team decided it only wanted one Escalation chat. They didn't explain this to anybody via mass communication like an email (or if they did, it didn't go to the full audience). One day, IT just stopped responding to the tickets in the original Escalation chat. People started to ask for updates without response, and my boss's boss had to escalate before IT finally looked at tickets that had sat for 5 days.

Then, he started posting the following message, over and over, once per morning, in the original chat: ""ALL!! All escalations during the AE period should be put in the AE War Chat Room until the end of the AE period". Instead of copying and pasting the tickets in the 'wrong' chat to the correct one and sending this message as a 'tsk tsk' for going forward, he just decided to ignore them all. Some people never see this message because people are still putting tons of new ticket numbers in the old (wrong) chat, which push his message off of the screen (and he didn't Pin the message at the top or anything).

Today, after about 40 tickets had gone unresponded to, one of the actual directors of Customer Care showed up and started asking IT why they were ignoring all of these tickets, and to tell her where they're supposed to put them, because a lot of people didn't have access to the War Room Chat. Why? Well, because the IT director set the invite up to where it couldn't be forwarded, so it was just sent to the list of managers whose names he had several months ago. Never mind several people got promoted to manager since then, or that many managers never got an invite to that chat because their teams do not house seasonal representatives. So they're being directed to a chat they don't even have access to.

I mean this sounds like dude just created a process that would fail intentionally.

he = the IT manager person who is He Who is in Charge of Chats

bitch about your stupid, annoying coworkers more like it amirite

but yeah, the whole channels thing in Teams or Slack can be a huge nightmare

Get a new job already, N, at this point it’s starting to look like masochism. It’s the best job market maybe ever; switch fields if you have to, just do it.

There are reasons atm why I need the stability of a job that I've been at 17 years that won't bat an eyelid when I have to disappear unexpectedly due to emergencies in the home and the devil I know is what I need until stuff simmers down.but after, certainly

maybe if you had a dedicated thread to bitch out your job and annoying co-workers, and the suckiness of your job didn't seem to end up on almost every semi-relevant thread ... not to be a dick, but ... the fact that your job suckiness does seem to end up everywhere makes sympathetic ilxors keep suggesting you get a new job.

i'm definitely not mad at people for making the suggestion and I realize it's kind of spilling into multiple threads so I'm gonna work on just like...keeping it on FB or something.

to be honest I'm more posting for "lol get a load of this fucking guy" reactions as opposed to being vein-popping angry but it doesn't always read.

lol I could go off about all kinds of inefficient processes at work involving Teams and Sharepoint and OneDrive and Outlook and an outdated file management system that's separate from all that and only accessible to me via remote server that I have to log in to a VPN before I can access (I've actually been avoiding starting on something this morning, I just realized, because it's so painful to go through all the steps I have to go through to get the files I need). I also just generally find the Microsoft suite baffling, for example there is so much overlap between teams and sharepoint and onedrive. Even right now I'm involved in a project that I can access through sharepoint but not teams for some reason, whereas other projects I can access through both. I guess this fits "backward steps" in the sense of creating all these tools that are supposed to make workflow easier but just actually complicate things because things are scattered between more places and there's a lot of overlap and redundancy.

Every time I need something from the file management system:
1) Log into vpn on computer
2) "Approve" vpn login on phone
3) Log in to remote serve on computer
4) wait 3-5 minute for it to load
5) log in to microsoft suite on remote system, so I can email myself stuff from the file management system
6) get verification code texted to my phone from microsoft
7) enter code
8) load slow-loading file management system
9) email myself file from slow-loading file management system

We are supposed to migrate away from this to a unified salesforce-based system sometime *soon*, like the transition is supposed to be in process.

that sounds excruciating

in 2010 or so we used citrix as a remote desktop, it was so janky

It is actually anxiety provoking, especially since if I get interrupted before I finish and forget about the task for a while, I could wind up getting booted off.

During mandatory work from home, especially in the early days, it would frequently fail to log me in at all or run extremely slowly. It was nightmarish.

I acrually miss citrix desktop. Users could at least wrap their heads around the idea of having a virtual desktop that wasn't the actual PC desktop on their machine. Now with o365/onedrive/sharepoint/teams, they have no idea where their files are and you can't "save as" to rename and put them where you want them. It's just default download or open in the cloud. And the only training they're getting is canned MS propaganda that says nothing of how it works differently in our environment with shared autologin workstations and the like. Local IT can't support it because they have very little control over it. One of its primary selling points is cutting IT costs (staff) through standardization, but it's really just leaving it up to users to figure out or screw up on their own.

i do not miss Citrix desktop at all. hate virtualization setups in general, they "save money" by giving shitty low memory allocation workstations that are also network-constrained

"Open in Desktop App" after which you are prompted to "Continue Here." Extremely fucking confusing even to me as a person who's generally pretty comfortable learning new platforms. And you have to be super cognizant of whether you are working on a cloud document or a desktop document, otherwise you lose stuff - it looks identical except for the autosave feature being on.

While we are at it, Word still has not done a stich to straighten out all of its insane auto-formatting problems, they only seem to get worse. As someone whose job is like 30-50% drafting things in word that require a lot of formatting, this is another nightmare. Random font and style changes in mid sentence, painstakingly setting up "Styles" that never actually hold or work, endless confusion about list levels and numbering continuation. And merely saving a doc to the cloud and opening it on another computer can entirely change formatting -- we had a filing nightmare once where at the last minute we were over a page limit because of this.

It used to feel like you could kind of get around this stuff by learning advanced stuff and becoming a power user, but now it just seems FUBAR.

As a sharepoint admin/developer i avoid this stuff by avoiding this stuff

Theyll catch me someday boys but pls god not today

Virtualized development environments were the best thing about one of my old jobs because you could clone your machine and run several different scenarios concurrently and you didn’t lose all of your work if your office machine died or waste days getting set back up after a mandatory technology refresh

I acrually miss citrix desktop. Users could at least wrap their heads around the idea of having a virtual desktop that wasn't the actual PC desktop on their machine.

these things still exist though -- Right Networks is the one I'm familiar with -- the janky thing was always moving things from virtual to actual, and the classic "how can I print?"

Honestly, one thing that keeps me sane is the ability to create shortcuts to folders that I think should be in certain directories or subdirectories, but the owner (generally, my co-worker) has put elsewhere, because his organizational schema is different than mine, partly due to working on different parts of projects than I do, and also because his brain is a mystery and he doesn't get enough sleep.

One thing I don't miss, ever, is the old versioning systems where you had to check files in and out -- I think there was one that had some kind of penguin emoticon or something? This was over 15 years ago and I only remember it being annoying

the word “repository” just came back to me in a nightmarish flashback