Technical Frustration

Have you ever experienced that unknown technical problem with anything? It could have been your digital television set up that just did not seem to work as it should. It might have been that you could not get voice mail set up as it should. Perhaps it is email you are not getting.

If you are one of those serious bloggers who has a great technical background you might want to stop reading right about here.

Over the past couple of weeks all of the three technical difficulties have been experienced by me. Take the digital television set up. Based on the commercials it seems really easy right? All you have to do is plug it in. Right. There is no question that is all that is needed to be done and the system should set itself up (if you follow the instructions in the booklet provided). However, our experience is that if the remote does not point directly at the box and the television at the same time, only one of them will go off. Then every time you press the power button you turn one off and one on. This means resetting the system again. Total frustration.

How about voice mail and call forwarding. For some telephones, such as the one we have in our dining room, all you have to do is dial *98 and you get voice mail. However, on other telephones, such as the one in my office upstairs, *98 connects you to the traffic reporter for CHFI radio. If you have a digital phone it is one number to call, if you have an analog phone a separate number is required. Again, remembering the right combination or not can lead to frustration.

Now to the email item. You set up your email to be forwarded from your web mail to your Outlook. All works just fine until one fine day someone asks why you did not respond to their email. What email? you say. Then you go searching through your web mail (remember you set up the auto-forward so you would not have to do that). Sure enough it is right there, just did not get sent to you.

You must have changed something, right? Wrong. All the settings are just as they should be. So, like any good consumer you contact your web host. In the middle of your on-line support chat you get a note, "server disconnected". Which server? Your web host? Your ISP? Your computer itself? Who knows, the message does not clarify but only adds to confusion and confusion leads to frustration.

So you try again. This time the rep tells you that is was an unexpected cancellation at their end. However, if you have every technical spec for the missing emails they can look into it for you. Of course, not being a techie all you know is who sent the note and when. To your surprise, an email to their support tells you that their server was down for maintenance and items got dropped. Sure would have been nice to know. However, the assumption by those working on the server is that you will know that through some inspired vision or technical knowledge.

Talk about adding to your frustration, you contact the support centre for your event promotion only to find out it is on the west coast and they will not be in until about 3 hours after you start your day. An email to them gets a stock response that your inquiry has been received and a response will be sent within 24, 48 or 72 hours (depending on which one you use). Not much use if you want to know how to do something now.

The bottom line to this rambling is that not everyone has the same level of knowledge about something that you might take for granted. The individual may simply be a client/user that expects things to work as promised. It is understood that often something can "go bump in the night". People accept that. Just let us know in layman's language and the world will go a lot smoother for everyone concerned.