Are you allowed to search out people who are in "monk mode" and thwack them over the back with a wooden stick? (Something I actually experienced last year while visiting a temple in Kyushu. My phone was on silent at the time ...)
Back in the day, they first thing I did after paying for a very expensive Sound Blaster audio card was set Microsoft Windows to ‘No sound’. Even today, my laptop and work phone are on permanent notification off mode. I need the audio on for conference calls, and I’m not OCD, but with the 100s of message alerts I already get displayed on my laptop TEAMS app/Windows Toast messages/phone Lock Screen there’s already an overload of useless stuff breaking my concentration.
I was once, at work, told to ignore all emails/messages (including the PANIC MODE ON type ones) and just “fix-this-bloody-thing-that-they’ve-broken-pretty-please “ which nearly resulted in someone driving 80 miles to knock on my door to see if I was still breathing instead of checking with my assigned task manager that they’d heard/seen me in the last business day..
In my experience, only recruitment consultants do these days. It's how I filter calls from numbers I don't recognise, spammers about the accident I didn't have don't leave a message and spammers enquiring if I'm interested in a role they're recruiting for that's not even vaguely related to my skills do.
More likely they're Chinese monks that moonlight at Zoom. Having been mortally offended and added all these niggling little issues in to the Zoom code!
Re: your column (oo'er missus) - I wonder home much computer storage in the world is hosting lost/locked emails/message/info that people have forgotten how to access or just given up on and it will never be accessed again....
Fascinating how greylisting is absolutely unknown by any company sending out 2FA emails after only 20 years or so. But 2FA is so 2010s. I already encountered 3FA - unknown password (yes, send me a sms with a code for password reset) , luckily not yet retired mobile phone number for the SMS (even the phone battery still charged), and then one of those stupid security questions like "What is the name of the first maths school teacher of the best friend of your mothers second cousins dentist's assistant" where of course everybody puts some super secret answer like "Whoopdidoo=3498413" which has nothing to do with the question because they suspect the companies collect and sell the data from these very personal questions...
Bloody hell, Alistair. You've hit a sore nerve here.
My initiation to 'video conferencing' started badly and went downhill from there. Your references to back-up email addresses still leaves me feeling up a creek, paddle-free.
An early experience involved me travelling 3 hours to Consultants offices to use their 'state-of-the-art' video conferencing with a customer who was only another few minutes down the road. We had a 2-hour slot booked. Of course, it didn't work and the attention of their in-house 'experts' (excuse me while I vomit) took exactly one hour fifty-five minutes to fix the fault. Whereupon we were ejected from the room as it has been booked by others for their conference.
A three hour journey home completed an utterly wasted day with no lunch.
Zoom meeting registration: First Name, Second Name, Email Address. All mandatory, except that the Email Address field blocks text entry. Reproduced on different browsers and different client devices. WTF
Never mind that Zoom likes to update its server back end, rendering the client on my tablet incompatible for multiple weeks. When eventually a new client becomes available, it fails to install on my device.
My favorite is the selection, “Don’t ask on this device anymore.” That never, ever works.
Yeah the Zoom / Teams panic, I am personally very familiar with that one.
Cleese did some educational videos awhile back, one of them about How To Do A Presentation. As I recall, one of his first suggestions is to trial run the presentation safely ahead of time and work out the inevitable bugs (preferably with a hammer & dust pan).
Heh. Only the day before yesterday did I have to retry connecting to the vpn quite a number of times, just to see if any of the stuck sms's would be nudged into propagating to their intended destination. As usual, I resorted to sending a variety of test texts to/from the mfa device just in case it helps.
But I don't know if it does, maybe just waiting a few hours is sufficient. But if I had a few spare hours... I wouldn't be trying to get onto the vpn.
The number of times I have been left waiting for delivery of one of those "Confirm registration" SMS things, usually for someone else (because I am loth to register for things myself). Sending an SMS from my phone to theirs so as to prove they still have reception just increases the frustration.
Interesting band selection, as usual. "Little Big" has a number of amusing videos, I guess they came up with "pendejo" after moving from russia to los angeles... I'm sure there are enough russian equivalents of the word "idiot".
One of the myriad elf n safety systems at work auto-created me an account. Then it sent me a password reset email. Which sends me to the login screen. I have no password so have to click “forgot my password”, which isn’t true since I never knew it, but still. Clicking that sends me another password reset email ......
In a recent IT migration, I needed to generate a new password for a system which doesn’t do SSO. I raise a ticket. After a couple of chasing phone calls, I’m told the SLA for a password reset is a staggering five days, meaning I can only legitimately jump up and down a whole week later. At this point I lost my shit, it has to be said. Who signed us up to that? Just like the security guy who “was comfortable” with my laptop shutting itself down just ten minutes after I last prodded it, requiring me to spend the next ten minutes getting it back into life.
I tried to say that I feel your pain, but autosaveisforwimps insisted I register (yes, I have done this beofre) and then it sends an email to the company I used to work for telling me I need to reactivate my account - which I was on last week when I read that entry.
Hmm I had a similar problem due to various reasons I needed my admin account at work reset, someone did this but the password wasn’t accepted, the help desk can’t reset admin passwords digitally through all my recent contacts and found someone who looked like they could do it eventually (most of Wednesday morning later) I got through to a guy in our india office who reset it it in two minutes - actually I remote controlled his pc and did entered a new password myself.
If you want a 2fa mess just try HMRC eventually I gave up and rang them first thing in the morning got through and someone fixed the issue in 2 minutes rather than trying to do it online......
Oh I hate those sites which "forget" details you have told them to remember, without any cause.
I can put up with my bank asking for a fresh login once a month, but there are sites which demand a fresh login when you are ALREADY logged in. I'm looking at you, Ancestry.
They are also the site who can't cope with cookies. I get the demand that I accept cookies every time I change networks - often half a dozen times a day.
I'm still waiting for the confirmation mail(s) Meta told me they sent while I was on holidays in Morocco 2 weeks ago after detecting a suspicious login attempt - from the device I usually log in to Instagram. Maybe the problem is with Yahoo, as I too, used Yahoo for a one time email address for that?
Are you allowed to search out people who are in "monk mode" and thwack them over the back with a wooden stick? (Something I actually experienced last year while visiting a temple in Kyushu. My phone was on silent at the time ...)
I only use monk mode: all notification turned off, if it does not send to my email, it is not worse receiving. It decluttered my life a great deal.
Back in the day, they first thing I did after paying for a very expensive Sound Blaster audio card was set Microsoft Windows to ‘No sound’. Even today, my laptop and work phone are on permanent notification off mode. I need the audio on for conference calls, and I’m not OCD, but with the 100s of message alerts I already get displayed on my laptop TEAMS app/Windows Toast messages/phone Lock Screen there’s already an overload of useless stuff breaking my concentration.
I was once, at work, told to ignore all emails/messages (including the PANIC MODE ON type ones) and just “fix-this-bloody-thing-that-they’ve-broken-pretty-please “ which nearly resulted in someone driving 80 miles to knock on my door to see if I was still breathing instead of checking with my assigned task manager that they’d heard/seen me in the last business day..
All Windows I use are are set to "No Sound" and my phone has been on silent for 5 years now. (Notifications via smart watch only.)
Also, I do not understand people who HAVE to answer their phone for every call, at any moment. Do they not have voicemail?
Nobody leaves voicemail any more. I know I don't.
In my experience, only recruitment consultants do these days. It's how I filter calls from numbers I don't recognise, spammers about the accident I didn't have don't leave a message and spammers enquiring if I'm interested in a role they're recruiting for that's not even vaguely related to my skills do.
More likely they're Chinese monks that moonlight at Zoom. Having been mortally offended and added all these niggling little issues in to the Zoom code!
Great article. "we have emailed you a link"- Have you really? I'm sitting at my computer and nothing has arrived...
Weird video but I liked it
Re: your column (oo'er missus) - I wonder home much computer storage in the world is hosting lost/locked emails/message/info that people have forgotten how to access or just given up on and it will never be accessed again....
Fascinating how greylisting is absolutely unknown by any company sending out 2FA emails after only 20 years or so. But 2FA is so 2010s. I already encountered 3FA - unknown password (yes, send me a sms with a code for password reset) , luckily not yet retired mobile phone number for the SMS (even the phone battery still charged), and then one of those stupid security questions like "What is the name of the first maths school teacher of the best friend of your mothers second cousins dentist's assistant" where of course everybody puts some super secret answer like "Whoopdidoo=3498413" which has nothing to do with the question because they suspect the companies collect and sell the data from these very personal questions...
Bloody hell, Alistair. You've hit a sore nerve here.
My initiation to 'video conferencing' started badly and went downhill from there. Your references to back-up email addresses still leaves me feeling up a creek, paddle-free.
An early experience involved me travelling 3 hours to Consultants offices to use their 'state-of-the-art' video conferencing with a customer who was only another few minutes down the road. We had a 2-hour slot booked. Of course, it didn't work and the attention of their in-house 'experts' (excuse me while I vomit) took exactly one hour fifty-five minutes to fix the fault. Whereupon we were ejected from the room as it has been booked by others for their conference.
A three hour journey home completed an utterly wasted day with no lunch.
Zoom meeting registration: First Name, Second Name, Email Address. All mandatory, except that the Email Address field blocks text entry. Reproduced on different browsers and different client devices. WTF
Never mind that Zoom likes to update its server back end, rendering the client on my tablet incompatible for multiple weeks. When eventually a new client becomes available, it fails to install on my device.
Zoom. Don't talk to me about Zoom.
My favorite is the selection, “Don’t ask on this device anymore.” That never, ever works.
Yeah the Zoom / Teams panic, I am personally very familiar with that one.
Cleese did some educational videos awhile back, one of them about How To Do A Presentation. As I recall, one of his first suggestions is to trial run the presentation safely ahead of time and work out the inevitable bugs (preferably with a hammer & dust pan).
Heh. Only the day before yesterday did I have to retry connecting to the vpn quite a number of times, just to see if any of the stuck sms's would be nudged into propagating to their intended destination. As usual, I resorted to sending a variety of test texts to/from the mfa device just in case it helps.
But I don't know if it does, maybe just waiting a few hours is sufficient. But if I had a few spare hours... I wouldn't be trying to get onto the vpn.
The number of times I have been left waiting for delivery of one of those "Confirm registration" SMS things, usually for someone else (because I am loth to register for things myself). Sending an SMS from my phone to theirs so as to prove they still have reception just increases the frustration.
Thank god it's not just me! .. Thanks Alistair!
Interesting band selection, as usual. "Little Big" has a number of amusing videos, I guess they came up with "pendejo" after moving from russia to los angeles... I'm sure there are enough russian equivalents of the word "idiot".
Poor sods have found themselves out of fashion due to world events, through no fault of their own - quite the contrary.
One of the myriad elf n safety systems at work auto-created me an account. Then it sent me a password reset email. Which sends me to the login screen. I have no password so have to click “forgot my password”, which isn’t true since I never knew it, but still. Clicking that sends me another password reset email ......
In a recent IT migration, I needed to generate a new password for a system which doesn’t do SSO. I raise a ticket. After a couple of chasing phone calls, I’m told the SLA for a password reset is a staggering five days, meaning I can only legitimately jump up and down a whole week later. At this point I lost my shit, it has to be said. Who signed us up to that? Just like the security guy who “was comfortable” with my laptop shutting itself down just ten minutes after I last prodded it, requiring me to spend the next ten minutes getting it back into life.
I tried to say that I feel your pain, but autosaveisforwimps insisted I register (yes, I have done this beofre) and then it sends an email to the company I used to work for telling me I need to reactivate my account - which I was on last week when I read that entry.
Physician - heal thy self
Hmm I had a similar problem due to various reasons I needed my admin account at work reset, someone did this but the password wasn’t accepted, the help desk can’t reset admin passwords digitally through all my recent contacts and found someone who looked like they could do it eventually (most of Wednesday morning later) I got through to a guy in our india office who reset it it in two minutes - actually I remote controlled his pc and did entered a new password myself.
If you want a 2fa mess just try HMRC eventually I gave up and rang them first thing in the morning got through and someone fixed the issue in 2 minutes rather than trying to do it online......
Oh I hate those sites which "forget" details you have told them to remember, without any cause.
I can put up with my bank asking for a fresh login once a month, but there are sites which demand a fresh login when you are ALREADY logged in. I'm looking at you, Ancestry.
They are also the site who can't cope with cookies. I get the demand that I accept cookies every time I change networks - often half a dozen times a day.
I'm still waiting for the confirmation mail(s) Meta told me they sent while I was on holidays in Morocco 2 weeks ago after detecting a suspicious login attempt - from the device I usually log in to Instagram. Maybe the problem is with Yahoo, as I too, used Yahoo for a one time email address for that?