I’ve been with WordPress and this BLOG for over twelve years, but I have to proclaim that WordPress can use some help. Two days ago I wrote what I believed was a pretty eloquent post covering a number of issues blended into a movie review. I was in the process of adding images and media to enhance the words. I hit the publish button and nothing happened. I realized that the post was frozen. Nothing I did would make it move in any direction. I saw a proclamation that read something to the effect that I had a more current back up. Without thinking about it, my bad, I hit the button for the backup. I got about in fourth of the piece from the backup.WTF? That is not my idea of a back up. A back up means you get your most recent post back in its entirety. I tried multiple ways to recover, but realized too late that I was fucked. I lost a great post. I’ve been stewing about for two days, but it won’t change a thing. WordPress is continuously trying to improve the experience but only succeeds in messing things up. I would be very happy using the original program of ten years ago. After all it’ s only a bit of trying and repetition that makes it happen.
I have never tried any other blogging program, but now I am open to exploring what else is out in the world. Every time WP tries something new it is to please the younger crowd that thinks from their seat. Of course the younger crowd has been kept from the world of logic and common sense. They all think like their phones, and therefore, so must the rest of us cater to the whims of Apple and Samsung. The result is a bunch of change that fails often, and causes an old guy like me to have apoplexy about it.
I have patiently endured the many changes WP has made and have tried their new editors, but I find that I like the old systems best. Once learned they make sense and when something makes sense it become easy to use. God forbid the younger set learn anything about making sense.
WP has made some things easier and more intuitive to use, such as the method for adding media into a blog post. Their latest systems are immensely easier to use, and I like them. What I don’t like is the tendency of the post to freeze and require shutting down in the middle of things to get things rolling again. That is not a normal thing, and it is a bug that must be corrected. Every time I been trouble shooting a problem like this I learn that I am not the only one having the issue. That is a problem for Word
Press.
Recently, I detected a problem with my video streaming service (Comcast) and lost hours trying to make the damned program work. All the time thinking is was me in my old age not understanding how to do these new fangled things. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it is not me it is the vendor of the service. That pisses me off. I spent a good part of my life fixing products that were expected to work but didn’t. I know how frustrating that can be for the developer, but dam it, that is not an excuse. Get off you asses and fix the problem. I finally extracted a fix-it commitment from Comcast on the issue of their lousy streaming service. They have passed the date they predicted, and I am still having issues. Less than before, but the problem is still lurking in their software and comes up often. My fix is to pull the plug and do a hard reset. Usually that fixes the problem for awhile. Funny, I never read that in the owners manual that I should pull the plug and reboot to fix a problem three times a night.
The problem with all of these companies providing all these wonderful services is that they are so successful that they write off the few customers who have problems. If my boss had ever caught me writing off a problem because it was too small to worry about, I would have been applying for unemployment. Eventually, companies will begin losing money to their competition and wake up to the fact that it is their fault that it is happening. In the meantime, poor Joe the customer wastes his precious minutes of remaining life trying to resolve an issue that cannot be resolved. Joe has to learn how to click the “off” button to fix the problem and substitute reading books instead.
Filed under: Aging, family, Seniors, Technology | Tagged: Amazon, Books, Comcast, Freezing computers | 12 Comments »
