Being Born Under A One Leaf Clover

What are the things which anger you the most? I am no different than most humans when it comes to things which get my goat. I am very unlucky when it comes to devices. I used to be unlucky with electronics, but after about forty years of problems everything seems to have leveled off in that area. Things had gotten so bad for me I was afraid to buy televisions. I had purchased several televisions in a row and in turn had to return each one, because when I got them home they didn’t work. This sort of thing makes you wonder if something in your home was causing the problem. Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. I went to a department store and bought a brand new television in a sealed box, got it home, plugged it in and got nothing but wavy lines. In those days we used antennas so I thought this might be the problem and spent a lot of time trying to position it, but nothing worked and I had to return the television and get another. Again I opened the box, set up the television only this time it wouldn't even turn on. I brought back this television and demanded a refund and bought another television at a different store and it worked perfectly. The original store was a famous department store so one would never expect this to happen.

I purchased an Apple II computer which only worked for a few days before I had to return it. I was lucky because it was a rebuilt one and the store replaced it with a new one, which had a couple of key caps fall. When I was younger I was given a beautiful gold metal encased transistor radio for my birthday. This was when these things were expensive. It worked for about a week, before a transistor burned out. I recall hearing the term, “I have never seen this happen before” mentioned for a good part of my life when I had to return things or have them fixed. Somewhere along the line I decided to purchase the best brand name appliances, because I got the idea they would work better. I have a lot of problems with washers and dryers. I went out and bought myself the best Maytag washer and dryer only to have them break down. One lasted a couple of weeks and the other for about a year before having to be repaired. It seems I just had no luck with these types of things.

The worst problems were car problems. I am the king of intermittent problems. These are the types of problems you have which disappear when you take your car back to the dealer. The worst part about these problems is when you tell the service department about them and they test the car and there is no longer anything wrong and they look at you like you are stupid. This is something I am still enduring. One car I bought new broke down on the way home from the dealer. He towed it back and then told me it was just something with the gas line. I went to drive it home and it broke down again and again it was towed back and I was given a loaner. A week later the car was finally repaired. Another car I had which was used, was hard to start, but every time I took it to the repair shop it started right up, aggravating the heck out of me. They couldn’t find the problem, I finally did myself. It was a wire which had broken, but it broke inside the insulation and looked fine and made intermittent contact. I now have a new car which has all the bells and whistles. One of the bells is the trunk opens automatically if you stand by it for five seconds. It only works occasionally, but works perfectly every time I take the car in. I noticed the power seat which slides back when you turn the car off, was making a grinding noise so I told my wife I was going to take it to the dealer. Like magic it stopped making the noise. It was as if the car wanted to make a fool of me.

How do you like it when you are either given bad information about a problem you are having or cannot understand the person you are talking to because they have such a heavy accent? I have had many bad experiences in this area. Let’s take the accent problem. I called Microsoft support, because I got a message on my computer about a problem activating Windows. I reached someone in India. I don’t mind this, but I could not understand a series of numbers she was telling me to insert. I had to ask her over and over what each number was and both she and I were getting very annoyed. Finally I got Windows working, but it took me far longer than it should have and by that time I was exhausted from trying to figure out what I was being told. This has happened to me with several different companies over the years when I needed support.

Wait to you hear this one. My bank is one of the biggest so you would think they would know what they were doing with online banking, wouldn’t you? I am very bad at balancing my checking account so I decided even though I have nothing special like a business account, I would use Quicken to download my accounts and balance my checkbook. This worked perfectly until a couple of days ago when I received an error stating my accounts could not be downloaded and to contact the bank. This was the start of a two hour marathon which solved nothing. The outcome was the technical support person told me the outrageous story that because I downloaded Quicken from a site and didn’t load it from a disk it was slightly different and wouldn’t work. I said that was ridiculous, but she insisted. I next called Intuit the company which makes Quicken and they told me it certainly was ridiculous and to call the bank back. I did and was told the same thing again which prompted me to examine the problem myself. I found the bank was sending me data with errors in it and had just changed their website. One of the problems had to do with an account which was a credit line I had never used and was showing a debit and another problem was an account was showing up twice with two different balances. I was finally able to delete the credit line from the program and one of the duplicate accounts, reload the other accounts and now everything is fine.

Several times in my life I have been told crazy stories by people who should never be in the job they are in because they are not qualified. Clearly the woman in the technology department at the bank was in the wrong job, because she had to make up a story to cover her ignorance of the problem. It is a shame when the public is subjected to this type of thing.

Bad luck with devices compounded by companies which really don’t care about solving problems they created can really drive one nuts, but we always have the option of changing companies don’t we?