Frustration

I may give up on computers and electronics all together.

Supposedly my Alienware is on its way back to me. Not that @DellCares told me this. Not that Dell called the correct phone number to tell me this. Dell called and left the message on my home phone DESPITE my having called the day before to explicitly ask to have all communication come to my cell phone. Just one more example in this total farce of how one hand of Dell has no clue what the other is doing.

There was a very cool presentation scheduled for SL on Friday Feb 24th. I have it on my calendar. I arranged to work from home that day so I can make it inworld. The original email was sent Jan 25, 2012 and listed 4 events for their Thursday “Train for Success” speaking series and listed the dates. I copied the dates into my calendar, focusing on the DATES not the other text. Then on Feb 22 I got a reminder email. I saw it was the same 2 events, ignored the email. Unfortunately this was in the email: this Thursday, February 23, noon ET (please note that we had the date wrong in our previous email). No highlighting, no alert in the subject, nothing to catch my eye and make me realize that I had the wrong date. Yep, I missed it.

Got home today, booted up my work machine, opened my browsers. I use Firefox with great reluctance. I keep most of my tabs open in Chrome. My coworkers think I’m nuts – they all love Firefox. I think it stinks. I think it runs terribly on my machine, I think it crashes. I’m willing to concede that all of that could be me, my machine, my settings. I used to use it exclusively until it kept crashing on me when I had music playing. But I keep 4 basic tabs open: my avatar’s email account, my RL persona twitter account, Google reader, and a work-related tab. Tonight – Twitter no longer works on Firefox for me. Yes – this is strictly Firefox related. Twitter opens just fine in Chrome and IE for me.

My Dell Inspiron, which has been trying valiantly to support my SL habit, is now freezing every 60 seconds or so. I tried to talk to Honour, but it’s very hard when the machine freezes and you can’t type or move. I logged out.

I’m tired of being warned left and right that as of March 1st, Google owns my data. I’m not tired of the WARNINGS, you understand, I’m tired of what they imply. I’m frustrated by the concept that we and our personal data are simply up for sale. That we cannot derive benefit and joy from all the cool technological advances without the fear of all the not-so-nice folks harming us via those same technological advances.

I want my gaming computer back and working. I want people to proof-read their emails, or at least send corrections that stand out. I want things to work. If I have a question, I want to be able to contact support and get an answer without getting a run-around.

I know I’m tired. I know that this is frustration writing. But it’s been 3 weeks with NO gaming computer, and weeks before that of an ailing gaming computer.

So….. I got it out of my system. I’ll finish on a positive note. Where I live, winter has basically passed us by this year. After last year – that’s okay with me. Normally I love the change of seasons. But last winter was harsh enough to count for at least two, if not three, winters. On Feb 19 my crocuses were up. My parsley stayed blooming through the winter, as did the dill. The bay leaves almost made it. 🙂 You see the photos here. I will look at my plants. I will pick up my hard-back book that I got at the library on Sunday and I will curl up in a chair, with a cat or two on my lap, and read. Like the Terminator, like MacArthur, I’ll be back.