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

on my bedroom TV the ideal volume lies somewhere between 0 and 1 - is either off or too loud. and i think the 'dial' goes up well beyond 20 bars.

(main tv has a 'dial' that goes around more than once, 360 degrees is like 30% of maximum, which kind of breaks the analogy)

the microwave 'I've finished' beep sounds like it's designed to be heard from the other side of a large house, is far too loud for my 1 bed flat. but i can stop it by opening the door early.

I finally bought big, floor Bluetooth speakers cause was sick of all the smaller ones not being loud and/or bassy enough. These are for sure loud but vol level 1 is TOO LOUD. Luckily there's also sliders on the actual speakers so I can turn those down and have the volume be low enough.
If you go in the command hub or whatever the fuck apple calls it on the iPhone, you can slide the volume with your finger but of course it's a digital fake slider so you still get huge quantum jumps between volume settings. Dumb.

My 2017 car is bad with volume since the knob is non-mechanical. If I leave it up too loud, then when I turn the car back on it's several seconds before I can either turn it down or turn it off. I've had a few years to learn this lesson but it still happens occasionally.

Okay, trying to read a simple article on my phone and the text keeps jumping and diving as special ads 'just for me' load into the article.. FFS

the little thing that looks like page in the url bar of android firefox is very useful - gives you a very plain view of webpages (but isn't always available)

I have a microwave that beeps too loud, but if I open it, early it causes a problem with the circuits, which I've learned how to fix but which I feel I should avoid.

Usually if you have some kind of media playing on your iPhone you can adjust the volume in a more fine-grained way with a slider on the lock screen.


Also, why does my ducking phone want to capitalize “Lock Screen” so bad? I half expect it to start inserting little registered trademark symbols every time I write “Apple” or “iPhone” (the auto-caps-ing of that “P” is bad enough)

What's interesting to me about the follow-ups to my post is that Bandcamp never gives me bank issues— I think that this was a "you spent too much money for one day you broke fuck" and/or somehow, when I purchased a few things online, the transaction was processed as happening *in those locations*, since two of them were very small companies that i was ordering specialty goods from. Reasonably, tho, one couldn't order a load of coffee in Oakland, then fly to New Hampshire to purchase a wee print of a railroad trestle, then go to a Farmers Market and later a TJ's in Philly...all within 7 hours. So why flag it at all!

Also now you all know what my father is getting for christmas

coffee?

in terms of fraud and flagging, there seems to be a revival of old fashioned check fraud -- this has happened to me twice in the past few months: once for my personal account (landlord had my rent check in his car, which got broken into), and once for the bank account at my job (totally unrelated to the other issue) -- the fraud crew will obtain checks on real accounts, and then print checks with the account into on it, and then use them to pay for things like groceries, car repairs, whatever the person who used my neighbor's account to buy at walmart. Idk if this is related to the increase in popularity of mobile check depositing or advances in printer technology.

I think the fraud crew will actually print checks that are adjacent in sequence to the stolen one so that flagging is less likely

i can't begin to describe my growing long-term rage with automated phone systems. and, related, how the people you ultimately talk to (after herculean efforts to fight past the machine and reach them) are systematically walled off from any of the information you might actually want, can't transfer you to anyone who does know anything, and are enabled only to do the same exact things you could do by going to their website.

I hear you.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/10/26/1048892388/meet-skimpflation-a-reason-inflation-is-worse-than-the-government-says-it-is

it's astounding the lengths they go to to keep you from talking to someone even when you know that is what you need

our internet company now has a thing where if you tell the robot "service outage," it demands that you walk along with it in the act of unplugging the modem and plugging it back in. which obviously we have already done, but anyway, to make sure you give this enough time, they play an annoying synthetic mouth-noise sound reminiscent of the song "popcorn," punctuated by the robot man coming back in periodically to say "thanks for your patience! your modem is still restarting!" after five minutes of this you can get to the point of demanding to talk to a person, whose first move invariably is to make you unplug the modem and plug it back in. imagine my joy at having to go through this experience three times in the last 24 hours.

xp
lol at your screen name. A+

if you call FedEx their customer service people do not have the phone numbers for the local distribution hubs that actually handle your packages

can't remember if i posted about it, but a few months ago we discovered it was literally impossible to call the various Best Buys in the general region and confirm if sth was really on the shelf or just listed in inventory. all the numbers just send you to a central authority, who have access only to the same inventory info you have looking at the website.

I went through the exact same thing with Ikea and record shelves a couple of years ago. It was exasperating. They were supposed to get the shelving I wanted in on a certain day, but a) I couldn't call them to confirm, and b) they wouldn't call me. They wouldn't even let me pay up front to put a hold on it.

I can vouch for tweeting at or messaging Ikea on Twitter. I'd been calling and emailing contacts listed on the website and getting nowhere, messaged their twitter and got a reply and a solution within an hour.

My experience was a few months into the pandemic, so maybe I caught them at a bad time. But they were adamant (I was in the store) that the only thing I could do was drive in an hour to their store the day of delivery and hope for the best--or, as DC posted, check their website.

in terms of fraud and flagging, there seems to be a revival of old fashioned check fraud -- this has happened to me twice in the past few months: once for my personal account (landlord had my rent check in his car, which got broken into), and once for the bank account at my job (totally unrelated to the other issue) -- the fraud crew will obtain checks on real accounts, and then print checks with the account into on it, and then use them to pay for things like groceries, car repairs, whatever the person who used my neighbor's account to buy at walmart. Idk if this is related to the increase in popularity of mobile check depositing or advances in printer technology.

― sarahell, Tuesday, 21 December 2021 01:15 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Woah you still pay for rent with cheques (checks), let alone groceries etc.? Banks almost have no idea what to do with them any more here.

Rent is one of the only things a lot of Americans still pay for by check. I haven't seen someone writing a check in a grocery or any other type of store in many years.

My partner's debit card was swallowed by an ATM and she needed to buy groceries and tried to use a check at a major chain supermarket and neither the cashier nor the supervisor knew what to do with a check.

The most irritating thing about my microwave is that it beeps periodically unti you press cancel.

I occasionally get a $15 check rather than coupons from the supermarket chain as a more enhanced reward for my patronage.

So you can probably guess what kind of fun I have presenting to the Kroger cashier a check made out to me from Kroger.

Hell, it took me awhile at first to figure out that I'm supposed to endorse the back with my signature.

I have a private client along with my agency ones; her aunt pays me with a check written on a family trust.

mother sends me a cheque for birthdays but doesn't seem to have noticed I've not been cashing them for years

the only other cheques i see were from the bank, dividends from my shares they have me, usually for about £1.50 and i didn't cash those either. but they have noticed and remind me every time.

last cheque i wrote was for a subscription to Wired magazine, a magazine about new technology!

i had the swallowed card thing happen to me one day when Christmas shopping leaving me with 53p in my pockets and 3 hours to kill in central London before meeting up with people. was quite dull. didn't think to go to a gallery, just wandered around not buying things.

I don't even know how checks work, at least as far as using checks made out to me as a payment (as in the Kroger example above). I haven't had a personal checkbook in about 20 years. I remember the last ones I had had "Date:_________ 19___" printed on them and I had to cross out the the 19 and write 20 in its place the last few times I used them. They were still printing non-Y2K-compliant checks in 1998.

mother sends me a cheque for birthdays but doesn't seem to have noticed I've not been cashing them for years

lol, my in-laws always send me an annual $50 birthday check. It's sweet of them, of course, but my birthday falls in the chaotic weeks before Christmas, when I have so many things on my mind that a bank run just gets lost in the to-do list. So on a couple of occasions, the check was stuffed into my glovebox or some other sketchy impromptu filing system to take to the bank later. However, the old man is very diligent about balancing his checkbook and once hounded me into February until I located whatever crevice I had stuffed it into. Ever since then, when I get a birthday card in the mail from them, it is like the "blue letter" scene from Hudsucker Proxy: drop everything else I'm doing and make a mad dash to the bank.

Mobile check deposit. Certainly has been a technological step forward. I always hated having to go to the bank and fill out a deposit slip.

can't believe 'free-to-use dating sites that actually work' hasn't come up yet on this 2000+ post thread

(not that i didn't somehow find a way to hack this in 2021; my gf of 7 months and i met on an ancient, almost entirely obsolete relic of the og okcupid model, whose freemium model still very much allows for the few active 'free' users remaining to actually, y'know, use the site)

Pedestrian traffic crossing lights covered by slats that you can only see if you are facing directly (and even then the green signal is not that clear).

I remember the last ones I had had "Date:_________ 19___" printed on them

I was writing a check last night and thinking, Ok, I think it's safe now to add a 20____ to these things now!

Also, my car insurance used to rebate me a $40 check every six months for my safe driving habits. They've since come around to "We are crediting your account $40 based on your driving record."

Microwaves often have a hidden setting where you can silence the beeping. Check the manual or look it up online. That’s the first thing I do when I get a new microwave, get rid of that beep.

Speaking of appliances, why does my new dishwasher need almost two hours to run a cycle whereas my old one needed 45 minutes? Granted the new one uses half the water, is vastly quieter, and has larger, better-designed racks (and three of them rather than two), but still.

The only cheque I've handled in the last 10-12 years was £40 compensation from Virgin East Coast for my Edinburgh-London train being over two hours late. I gave them my bank details, but they insisted on sending me paper. It turned up with my surname/first name reversed, I had to go all the way to Croydon to find a branch of my bank that was still open, and they refused it. And then I got jumped by some plastic coppers for taking photos of a sign in the shopping centre. A great day out.

I've thought the same thing about digital radio displays replacing analog dials. I mean, sure, the radio station is broadcasting at 102.5 FM, but maybe it comes in just a little clearer at 102.55.

If I win the lottery (I mean, I could make a start by playing the lottery), somewhere near the top of the list of useless crap I'd fill my house with, would be a lovely 1970s Marantz AM/FM tuner, with the gyro-wheel, the back-lit display, the oscilloscope trace. Particularly pointless, given the paucity of FM options in the UK.

I still pay rent monthly with checks, and still get bday/holiday gift checks from family. Mobile deposit is, as mentioned, the way to go.

Mobile check deposit. Certainly has been a technological step forward. I always hated having to go to the bank and fill out a deposit slip.

― Jeff, Wednesday, December 22, 2021 8:02 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, I totally forgot that this exists. Thanks for reminding me.

> It turned up with my surname/first name reversed

how?

the first kid on the register in my class was Russell Allen, who was forever being called Allen Russell by new / substitute teachers. probably went on to be a hairdresser...

(actually worked at smiths engineering, which is now part of some aerospace thing)

I loved being able to do check deposits via ATM. Like I felt that was a forward step. Haven't used a deposit slip since the 90s, though I still use checks from time to time. Mostly for school stuff. Schools like checks, because kids are not great at transporting cash.

My wife was an early adopter of "take a picture of the check and now it is deposited" thing. Like, once you have done so the paper rectangle is extraneous and you can just throw it out in the recycling bing. At first I was afraid. You could even say I was petrified. But now I'm a believer, because I realized that money was already just a construct. An abstract agreement about a certain arrangement of ones and zeroes.

This is just the logical extension of the way Yap Islanders use huge stones circles as money. A stone may not have moved in decades - in fact, may be under water - but everyone has a shared agreement about who owns which, and can thus be used meaningfully in transactions

Mike you’ll need to win the lottery by 2030 because there’s a good chance FM gets switched off then :/

I just received a $600 paper check from the State of California to do with as I see fit. It says "Golden State Stimulus II" on it.

I use paper checks all the time because it is more expensive to do a digital bank-to-bank transfer (we use a separate bank for our mortgage) than to write a check from my primary checking account, then deposit it in the mortgage account. I have yet to figure out a better way, even after some investigation.

Yeah, I probably write a half dozen checks a month between rent and various utilities.

I just received a $600 paper check from the State of California to do with as I see fit. It says "Golden State Stimulus II" on it.

Ah, So you immediately rolled it into a tight tube to snort cocaine through, right?

I mean, right?

I just received a $600 paper check from the State of California to do with as I see fit. It says "Golden State Stimulus II" on it.

― Andy the Grasshopper, Wednesday, December 22, 2021 10:20 AM (fifty-seven minutes ago

did you file your taxes literally on October 15th? .... those showed up approx 5-6 weeks after the state processed your tax return. Honestly, the dumbest was the federal stimulus payments that got sent via debit card and it was annoying to go through the process of transferring the money from the card to one's bank account.

I use paper checks all the time because it is more expensive to do a digital bank-to-bank transfer (we use a separate bank for our mortgage) than to write a check from my primary checking account, then deposit it in the mortgage account. I have yet to figure out a better way, even after some investigation.

― we need outrage! we need dicks!! (the table is the table), Wednesday, December 22, 2021 10:36 AM (forty-seven minutes ago

exactly! and the funds go through much more quickly than if you do some tech workaround via paypal, though you could possibly have the mortgage account set up as an alternate linked account in venmo and then one of you would venmo the money to the other ... which is dumb in theory, because only couples could do this.

Theo literally Venmos me or uses Zelle to transfer his portion to my checking account, then I write a check to myself as the holder of the mortgage account, then take a picture of the check and do the deposit that way. Why? Because I'm not paying $15 transfer between two bank accounts that happen to be at different banks.