THE computer at work went down again the other day. It always does it when you have 10 different computer jobs to do. I am sure it purrs away when I am on leave, resting up so it is ready to pick up the 300 e-mails for me to delete on my return.
Of course, we have an army of IT people to fix computers at work. At home I have to ring Dr Dave. I never ring him early enough. I always try to fix it myself, especially if it is beyond the kids. I sweat and swear for wasted hours.
Once we had three viruses and Dr Dave’s boy told me that we beat his personal best for the number of errors. The CD burner that didn’t burn was in fact burning but you had to use the burning program to read it.
Then there was the new printer that made up bodgie item numbers on the accounts. That led to the horrible situation where the computer people said it was the printer and the printer people said it was the computer. It worked fine on four other computers.
In the end the printer help person said they had found there were situations where my printer just didn’t do the job. The new one does. There was no warning from the salesman. Maybe computer stuff could carry warnings like fags: “The product may adversely affect your blood pressure.”
Transferring information from one place to another is always the worst part of computing for geriatrics. I tried to set up a system to transfer money from my bank to the bank we use to lose money on the stock market. I swear I followed the instructions. No happiness. I e-mailed both ends. No happiness. I rang both ends. Increasing unhappiness. Bank one blamed bank two and vice versa.
I was assured they were not allowed to talk to each other because of privacy laws. Or was it piracy laws? In the end I sent an e-mail to both suggesting it should be sorted within 24 hours or my business was leaving both of them. A nice young lady rang me and took me through it and we sorted it. It was just that their instructions were misleading and the phone conversations made it worse.
But it is not just in the civil service and domestically that there are problems. It is easy to lose your self-esteem when every button you press makes matters worse. But the guys who drive the big machines in banks and businesses are supposed to know what they are doing.
A couple of weeks ago Colonial First State sent me an account number and a PIN (separately, of course). They didn’t work. The one I already had still worked. So I gave them a call. It turned out their computer just decided to send out 10,000 new account numbers and PINs and they were ringing everyone to tell them.
Last week I tried to sell some shares. I did all the stuff correctly. The next day I received an e-mail telling me my order was faulty and had been “purged”.
When I tried to find out why, they told me the computer had decided to purge all the orders for that share. They put them back on the market for me (at Internet rates). The next day I was purged again. Another call. It will all be fixed soon.
I have had a few successes in the IT arena. Our computer has a phone line attached to it. The computer answers the phone. The stuff to do it is all inside.
I worked out you can have different answering machine messages. Most of the time if you ring our number you get answering message one, which is pretty standard and enables you to leave a message.
But between 6pm and 7.30pm, which are the traditional times at which telemarketing vermin strike, it answers: “Hello … yes … yes.”
So the telemarketers think they are speaking to someone and it wastes their time the way they waste mine.
But that is my only recent success.
In one of last year’s issues of Australian Gourmet Traveller was a CD. It was loaded with recipes and good places to eat. Last night I installed it. Successfully. First pop. Problem is that now everything else on the screen has become smaller. Too small for me to read. “ No problem,” I told Mrs R. “I will fix it tomorrow night.”
Mrs R has found an engagement she had forgotten about elsewhere. And I have to decide whether to wait for the kids to come home or go straight to Dr Dave.
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