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

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.

seriously! it is so stupid! ... also the thing where you can have the bank send a check to someone ... and it takes a week, because they are mailed from like south dakota.

Also, I think a lot of the electronic payment processing systems are gonna step up on charging increased fees or being more thorough in terms of vetting "friends & family" payments

Idk ... this recent thread topic made me realize how many people probably have regular day jobs working for large employers that don't involve accounts payable or receivable. ... for a month at work, at one of our client sites, we had the contractor that gets paid via paypal, the contractor that gets paid via venmo, the contractor we write two checks to: one for labor and one for materials, and the contractor that we pay in cash, and these people were getting paid at least once a week.

xp - I think you could set up the mortgage account as a linked account to your venmo, then Theo could venmo you, and you could transfer it right then to the mortgage account?

xp to self: and this is really a backwards step in that it used to be you could pay everyone by check except for the people who were adamant about being paid in cash. Like: two payment methods, now there are at least a half dozen.

bank to bank transfer works differently depending on whether you’re doing an outgoing or incoming transaction, sometimes? like sending money from one might incur a fee on the source account, but another bank I use doesn’t charge anything if I use them to transfer funds into the account from another bank. they just want more money in their hands

well yeah, it's usually the person paying that gets charged the fee because their bank is "doing the work" as well as disbursing money. Wire transfers are different. And foreign transactions.

I was thing of tables’ transferring issue. Might be able to just reverse it from a push to pull situation and save a check

Ovens that you can't just turn on and set a temperature with two handy dials, instead you also have to set a cooking time via an options menu and press "start", on a touch screen that only makes sense with the aid of the manual.

My friend has a microwave that is so complicated I can barely cook anything in it when I housesit. A microwave!

Dials are so satisfying. I imagine the % of the world that prefers repeatedly stabbing buttons (worse still, flat buttons) to adjust a time or temperature to be very small.

Just last night I tried to microwave on “low” for the first time ever and realized I had no idea how to do it. There’s a button that says “Power level” but it doesn’t seem to do anything at all. Could be that the microwave’s broken but this is a newish model I haven’t used all that much.

I have that same issue on my microwave I don’t know if this helps in the case of yours, but I realized I had to do "cook time" first, then hit “power level”. Frustratingly, it only affects that specific instance—so if I need to cook a few more minutes after it finishes, I have to re-do the whole process, rather than it remembering the level.

That's it! What I didn't get was you have to not just press "cook time" but actually set a cook time before hitting "power level." Once I do that it says "PL 10" and then enables me to change the 10 to a lower digit.

Of course a button that just said "low cook" would be much simpler. Don't think we really need 10 different microwave temperatures.

7.5, that's a good power level.

Ovens that you can't just turn on and set a temperature with two handy dials, instead you also have to set a cooking time via an options menu and press "start", on a touch screen that only makes sense with the aid of the manual.

TBH I still see the introduction of that second dial as a technological/practical backward step; much handier when there was just the one.