"Let's Verify Your Corporate Idiocy!"
I'm almost through my third month of using the Everything's Up To Date version of Office products, including Word, Excel and Outlook. Eleanor's finishing up her first month, and she's made her own choices about some options (like not using the cloud for file storage or the Outlook calendar option). We both are having slow adjustments to it all, and usually find the built-in or online help recommendations to be pretty damn helpless.
My biggest annoyance of the past week was discovering that my calendars were not syncing between phone and laptop. One of the sheer joys of the upgrade was that I no longer needed to use iTunes to manage the sync; I didn't even need to connect the two devices to each other by physical cable. Enter an appointment in either place, and voila!, it instantly appeared in the other.
There were exceptions, of course. Any time I was sent an email invitation to an online meeting (usually a Teams court appearance), it would only show up in my Offishul Outlook calendar connected to my non-Apple email address. No biggie; I just remembered to put an entry in the iCloud version I have as my go-to, that duplicated or at least pointed to it. But last week, I noticed that entries in either were NOT showing up in the other. Ever. I looked for helpful hints in official Apple and Microsoft support groups:
"Make sure your phone is not in airplane mode." Derp. I haven't been on a plane since 2005.
"Flush your DNS cache." Sounded kinda dirty, but I tried the DOS-looking command and it did nothing.
"In Outlook 365, from the file menu, select Account Settings>Account Settings." Obviously a suggestion from the Department of Redundancy Department. Whatever it was, it didn't work. But meanwhile, back at the ranch file menu, was a box buried at the bottom of the list:
slow and disabled com add-ins
Since nothing else had worked, I clicked it, and there was my answer: Oopsies, it looks like Outlook crashed when we tried syncing your calendars, so rather than fix the bug, we decided to just disable syncing. Ticky this box====>> if you want to turn it back on.
I did, and instantly appointments popped up in both places!
So now I know what to do if this happens again. Unfortunately, the nature of the problem is such that you won't necessarily notice it's not syncing appointments until (a) it doesn't and (b) you miss one. In turn, that means I'll need to double check after every entry to be sure it's working, which eliminates much of the efficiency the "feature" is intended to create.
----
Other things are incredibly easy to turn off on your own.
We did a short round of bill-paying this afternoon. Eleanor's been learning how to access all the various sites, navigate the mazes of logins and HOW DO I JUST PAY THE DAMN BILL, and then print the confirmation. Every one of them makes some effort to get you to "go paperless" with your statements, and to get you to agree to autopay their bill every month or quarter or whatever. I've always resisted both; paperless billing is only as good as your access to the paperless method, and thanks to hacking and just plain bad coding, at least once a month I find myself locked out of being able to pay a bill because they didn't recognize my IP address or operating system or browser-
- and then go through these "Let's Verify Your Identity" rounds with two-factor texts or emails before I can GIVE THEM MONEY. Autopay has its own issues; often you're authorizing them to charge an unknown amount (which may be higher next time) on an unknown date (which may be earlier next time) and if you don't have the scratch, both they and your bank charge you fees for not having it.
For your convenience.
Anyway, while doing the billpay today, Eleanor inadvertently turned on paperless on one of the accounts. I turned it right back off. Their only stated incentives for this are: guilt (see the nice green leaf we put there?), alleged convenience (no stamps! even though you can pay online without stamps even if you get paper statements), and no clutter (from the places that move their websites and login procedures around like a floating crap game and you have to keep track of THAT clutter). The only ones I'll do paperless or autopay with are ones that actually give you a discount for doing it, and those, I NEVER tie to a debit or bank account, just to a credit card.
Now the one thing I would LOVE to be paperless is pharmacy paperwork. Usually a 30-day supply of a prescription med is accompanied by a 90-day supply of 8½ x 11 paper, filled on one if not both sides with lists of side effects, suicide prevention warnings, poison control center referrals, and endless streams of medicalese. The same ones on every bottle every time, times about nine for the two of us. I've asked if they could turn the paper off on those, like they fortunately have been able to send Eleanor's arthritis meds home in non-childproof caps. Nope. Gotta get those disclosures every time, trees be damned.
----
It's also annoying how they try to talk all cutesy when putting you through this. Banks and other websites increasingly go with "Let's verify your identity," or "Let's make sure your contact information is up to date." How about "Let's not and say we did," guys? AT&T was a constant annoyance of this kind; I say "was" because they ARE now on paperless and autopay because they showed me the money to do it, but I still log in occasionally to check a balance or get a record of a past call. Instead of "please wait" or just the spinning circle, you get this, every stinking time:
No, that's not true. Because before I could screenshot THAT, of course I got this:
Um, is "blown out of your ass" an available option?
Oh well. We're going to stream French Dispatch tonight after I feed the animals. At least THEY know who I am:P This entry was originally posted at https://captainsblog.dreamwidth.org/1679482.html. Please comment here, or there using OpenID.
My biggest annoyance of the past week was discovering that my calendars were not syncing between phone and laptop. One of the sheer joys of the upgrade was that I no longer needed to use iTunes to manage the sync; I didn't even need to connect the two devices to each other by physical cable. Enter an appointment in either place, and voila!, it instantly appeared in the other.
There were exceptions, of course. Any time I was sent an email invitation to an online meeting (usually a Teams court appearance), it would only show up in my Offishul Outlook calendar connected to my non-Apple email address. No biggie; I just remembered to put an entry in the iCloud version I have as my go-to, that duplicated or at least pointed to it. But last week, I noticed that entries in either were NOT showing up in the other. Ever. I looked for helpful hints in official Apple and Microsoft support groups:
"Make sure your phone is not in airplane mode." Derp. I haven't been on a plane since 2005.
"Flush your DNS cache." Sounded kinda dirty, but I tried the DOS-looking command and it did nothing.
"In Outlook 365, from the file menu, select Account Settings>Account Settings." Obviously a suggestion from the Department of Redundancy Department. Whatever it was, it didn't work. But meanwhile, back at the ranch file menu, was a box buried at the bottom of the list:
slow and disabled com add-ins
Since nothing else had worked, I clicked it, and there was my answer: Oopsies, it looks like Outlook crashed when we tried syncing your calendars, so rather than fix the bug, we decided to just disable syncing. Ticky this box====>> if you want to turn it back on.
I did, and instantly appointments popped up in both places!
So now I know what to do if this happens again. Unfortunately, the nature of the problem is such that you won't necessarily notice it's not syncing appointments until (a) it doesn't and (b) you miss one. In turn, that means I'll need to double check after every entry to be sure it's working, which eliminates much of the efficiency the "feature" is intended to create.
----
Other things are incredibly easy to turn off on your own.
We did a short round of bill-paying this afternoon. Eleanor's been learning how to access all the various sites, navigate the mazes of logins and HOW DO I JUST PAY THE DAMN BILL, and then print the confirmation. Every one of them makes some effort to get you to "go paperless" with your statements, and to get you to agree to autopay their bill every month or quarter or whatever. I've always resisted both; paperless billing is only as good as your access to the paperless method, and thanks to hacking and just plain bad coding, at least once a month I find myself locked out of being able to pay a bill because they didn't recognize my IP address or operating system or browser-
- and then go through these "Let's Verify Your Identity" rounds with two-factor texts or emails before I can GIVE THEM MONEY. Autopay has its own issues; often you're authorizing them to charge an unknown amount (which may be higher next time) on an unknown date (which may be earlier next time) and if you don't have the scratch, both they and your bank charge you fees for not having it.
For your convenience.
Anyway, while doing the billpay today, Eleanor inadvertently turned on paperless on one of the accounts. I turned it right back off. Their only stated incentives for this are: guilt (see the nice green leaf we put there?), alleged convenience (no stamps! even though you can pay online without stamps even if you get paper statements), and no clutter (from the places that move their websites and login procedures around like a floating crap game and you have to keep track of THAT clutter). The only ones I'll do paperless or autopay with are ones that actually give you a discount for doing it, and those, I NEVER tie to a debit or bank account, just to a credit card.
Now the one thing I would LOVE to be paperless is pharmacy paperwork. Usually a 30-day supply of a prescription med is accompanied by a 90-day supply of 8½ x 11 paper, filled on one if not both sides with lists of side effects, suicide prevention warnings, poison control center referrals, and endless streams of medicalese. The same ones on every bottle every time, times about nine for the two of us. I've asked if they could turn the paper off on those, like they fortunately have been able to send Eleanor's arthritis meds home in non-childproof caps. Nope. Gotta get those disclosures every time, trees be damned.
----
It's also annoying how they try to talk all cutesy when putting you through this. Banks and other websites increasingly go with "Let's verify your identity," or "Let's make sure your contact information is up to date." How about "Let's not and say we did," guys? AT&T was a constant annoyance of this kind; I say "was" because they ARE now on paperless and autopay because they showed me the money to do it, but I still log in occasionally to check a balance or get a record of a past call. Instead of "please wait" or just the spinning circle, you get this, every stinking time:
No, that's not true. Because before I could screenshot THAT, of course I got this:
Um, is "blown out of your ass" an available option?
Oh well. We're going to stream French Dispatch tonight after I feed the animals. At least THEY know who I am:P This entry was originally posted at https://captainsblog.dreamwidth.org/1679482.html. Please comment here, or there using OpenID.