modern life is rubbish

[barakta]

What pisses me off with current Ork laptop is that it'll say it needs and update and it can be rescheduled for end of working day... Except, invariably the laptop ends up being so crashy and buggy that I end up having to reboot it umpty times through the reboot to stop it doing badweird shit.

Today IT appear to have broken the key university records system that we do clicky things on and which generates auto-emails about ImportantStuff to the students, which is extra time critical at the moment Cos Exams. Registry responded to my "Error?" email with "yeah, we know, can you bug IT cos they don't seem to be responding to us".

I then got told to email our "IT Business Partner" (remember when they were just your IT manager, or IT representative?). HR seem to call everyone "business partner" as if they're some external client/consultant relationship. We're a fucking university, they're under paid peons like the rest of us.

[TheLurker]

*One* thing that our 3rd party IT "service has got right is is the installation and scheduling of the inevitable (as the sparks fly upwards m'dear) Windaes updates.  The bodge^w update is trickled down the wire and when everything is ready a little window, which cannot be closed, pops up saying, "Upgrade or else peasant!"  However it does give you up to 10 hours to do some work before applying the update off its own back. 

The fact that the upgrade alert can't be minimised is a bit irritating, but it's not a bad system given they've got to keep many thousands of machines up to date with whatever shit M$ is shovelling out.

[SoreTween]

My current employer does that too, you can even install the updates and further defer the inevitable reboot for 3 hours.  The system fails straight back into spectacular stupidity in that I shutdown my laptop every night (not suspend). Apparently that's not the right flavour of reboot as next morning the 3 hour counter is still running.
Mostly though I just stop work, close all the apps & tell it to get on with it as everything seems much slower when there are updates pending, especially outlook.  My employer pays me the same to watch updates as to try being productive so fuck it.

[T42]

Back when I used a version of Windoze that MS still supported the Law of Sod dictated that during the summer every "system updating: do not shut down" message would coincide with the approach of a BFO thunderstorm. Microsoft Tenterhooks^TM.

[Auntie Helen]

Plantronics.
I have a work-supplied Plantronics headset for teams calls etc. Fine.

But not only does it require a driver ( for a headset? really? ), it also has a full-blown desktop app, called the Plantronics Hub. A full-blown desktop app? For a set of headphones? Really Really?

The only function of this app seems to be to update itself, which it seems to do about once a week.
I've never come across such an unnecessarily update-needy simple peripheral device.

I have that at work too.

I have still not found out how to adjust the volume except for in the nanosecond when at random times it pops the volume slider on the screen. When I am almost certainly not ready with my mouse.

[Mr Larrington]

There was nothing particularly wrong with the user interface for the iOS version of VLC, so they reworked it to make sure nothing was where your stubby peasant finger expected it to be.  Look, it is neither big nor clever, so don’t do it.