Technology

Once upon a time new technology was better tested and had better support than it does today. It has become common practice for most of the major sellers to simply put their new stuff on the market and let the users provide the testing data —— so there are many minor problems and sometimes major glitches as in the first iPhone users who were royally screwed with inoperable and very expensive paper weights.

Then there are the times when errors are preventable and the incompetents responsible just could care less. I have been trying for at least two weeks to access a copy of my phone bill online from Verizon. Their web site is all hosed up and just takes you in crazy circles.

I cringe when I see their TV ads about people using them for “tech support” when they can’t even run their own web site.

Another example which really ticked me off was buying an eBook and having terrible errors on almost every page. It is obvious they simply used a scanner and a text recognition program, then didn’t bother to proof read it. I don’t have a problem with that when the book is free from some of the free sites but I paid for this book and shouldn’t have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the heck these garbled words mean.

In both cases I sent an email. The eBook seller promptly replied that they would “check into it”, then acknowledged I was right and they would “notify the vendor”. How about a refund?

Verizon has never replied, not even an automated response so I don’t suppose anyone even looks at the email complaints they get. I would call them but am not interested in waiting on the phone for a half-hour to talk to somebody in Bombay reading a script written in Bangladesh about some problem caused by a Taiwanese programmer who telecommuted to Boston to update a server in New York.

Still —— I love technology. When it works.

Some added thoughts and information: I finally received an automated response from Verizon. It got caught in their spam filter. Wouldn’t you think they could have allowed their own automated response through?