It's all too complicated
Have been wrestling with various tech issues which seem to me to have (by and large) been introducing entirely unnecessary levels of complication into their processes.
We have two Nest smoke/CO alarms, which are supposed to operate in sequence, i.e. if the downstairs one goes off, the upstairs one will be alerted, and vikyverky, but this is apparently not happening. Also, in the app (one has to operate the things through an app, it is quite horrid), one or the other was always showed up as offline. (I will not recount the horror that was actually getting the things to talk to wifi.)
I went to the website of Nest and by poking around found out that we were not the first to have encountered this problem. There was an answer in the Knowledge Base, which involved Doing Stuff with one's router...
Otherwise one has to engage by phone or in chat. Siiiiiigh.
So I poked about a bit in the router settings, and a few days later, both show up as online, though we have not yet proven whether they will go off in sequence. Whether the change has anything to do with anything I did, deponent knoweth not.
***
While I was fussing around with the router, the landline phone developed an Ominous Message to Check the Phone Line, which was dead.
This turned out, when I contacted Zen the next morning, to be an entirely unrelated fault external to the house, fixed before midday.
Zen, and, to some extent, BT Openreach, are the only ones who come out of any of this with an approval rating.
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I had a postal communication indicating that a credit card I have had since Time Whereof The Memory of Man Runneth Not is going over to two-stage validation for online transactions. They do not have my mobile number, requisite for this.
Endeavouring to register myself online simply so that I can update my contact details has taken up several hours of my life which I shall never get back. One has to acquire a telephone banking secret number before one can even register. I spent nearly an hour on the phone with an agent, much of which was listening to either hold music or curious watery noises that suggested that they are employing selkies, and then got cut off as I was about to be able to acquire a secret number.
I sent a stroppy complaint by email.
I had someone call back this morning, and I now have A Secret Number.
However, to register, one needs to put in a whole load of user names, passwords, memorable things, etc etc, and then, even though Mobile App Did.Not.Want it appears one still has to download the app to get some further secret digital code to proceed (which they post to one, wot happened to the carrier pigeon I ask).
This is a credit card with a limit which is surely peanuts in the overall picture of a bank's activities.
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My printer is flashing a meaningful red light at me to indicate that toner is getting low.
It is a Samsung printer.
Samsung offloaded all printer-related matters to HP a few years ago.
It takes a fair amount of poking about on their website to find out this fact, just saying.
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I will not recount the enormity of ugh which is the site redesign of a library I have been accustomed to use frequently. I think they were aiming for some kind of simple, and I'm not sure simple and one-stop and 'like Google' is what one wants in that context. What it means is half the time I can't even find things I know are there, or used to be (it's possible they might have unsubscribed to some subscription databases I suppose).
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