Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

claps for MI5 being disbanded!

haah whoops

windows 10 is grand tbh

last good windows version was XP.

Why, in 2019, is on-hold music always so awful? I'm sitting on the phone waiting to get a washing machine serviced and the music sounds like it's being played on a scrunched up cassette tape at the bottom of the ocean. It also loops round in a really annoying way so that the tune cuts off after 10"s, a short gap that sounds like someone's about to pick up, and then it starts again.

Telephones in general still sound like absolute shit.

The main problem for me with on-hold music is that it's almost always really loud

People who have on-hold music on their telephone systems are rarely on hold on their telephone systems.

Ours probably says something like "Our offices are closed for the Memorial Day holiday...."

We once had a customer escalation cos he was on hold for ten minutes and at one point the hold music played a Christmas song

when did it become ok for them to show 4:3 clips on a 16:9 tv and fill the gaps on the sides with a blurry copy of the edges?

Truly the comic sans of video presentation.

must be linked somehow to news/entertainment shows deciding on standards for using cell phone footage shot in the vertical orientation

They could at least fill the black space with like fractals animations or something. Dancing babies? I'm just spitballing here.

Used to be that time traveling machines were simple to program. You set the destination date and time, and boom, you're on your way.

Now you have to pick a primary day and a secondary day if the time jump doesn't work, and the secondary defaults to 12/12/2019 for some reason.

it's downloading a fuckin' system update so I can't jump back to my native time.

Y'know, it sure did seem to me like there were an awful lot of extra people wandering around today.

wait til u see what happens to you in 5 minutes

u get zinged. and it winds up on the "zing" thread.

I am preemptively mortified.

shit maybe now it won't happen.

maybe discussed upthread, but a big one that's been cropping up on various sites over the past few years: weird algorithmic "smart" searches so that even if you know very specifically what you're searching for, the site tries to find other related/similar/machine-identified stuff.

ha i was venting about it back in august apparently

otm now and in August

Most search functions these days are configured under the assumption that the end user is a subliterate beast that cannot possibly be searching for the string of characters it clumsily typed in with its were-paws, here let us offer you a panoply of unrelated alternatives.

This may belong more in whatever thread was lamenting how Pinterest ruined Google Images, but whenever I am looking for some software to do a simple task (recording streaming video, say), the Google results are filled with review comparison sites that seem like fronts to sell some product by iSkysoft or some other spammy-seeming company.

Yeah, I was searching for like, some credible earbud reviews for a gift last week and every search result would list a bunch of companies with startup-sounding names that I've never heard of before and apparently all the products were great! Kinda the same with searching for something in Amazon. As a decidedly non-techie guy, it makes the whole experience worse for me because I'm wondering like "do these companies have customer service? did they exist last month? will they exist next month?"

https://jalopnik.com/your-modern-car-is-a-privacy-nightmare-1840483775

I don't know how Amazon's lackadaisical shrugging in response to what's basically a burgeoning black market of third-party sellers is going to benefit them in the long run. Like you'd think the faith of the casual consumer would start to erode after the third or fourth bogus POS they bought by mistake. I mean, I don't know how frequent an occurrence it is, but I'm generally pretty careful about these things and I've still wound up accidentally buying stuff from rogue Amazon listings whose true nature was not as advertised.

I've recently a noticed a new one -- one of the nice things about gmail is that it will filter most promotional emails into the promotions tab. ... now I'm getting a lot of them categorized as updates. Undoubtedly the marketing people have probably worked out how to "beat the filter" .... idk.

xxxp the headphones subreddit is a decent place to search brands / get cheap recommendations. There's some legitimately nice so-called "Chi-fi" stuff.

I resorted to Amazon for one gift recently... one of those that is from a third party seller but "fulfilled by Amazon" from their warehouse domestically (fully third party you never know what the hell you're getting into or where it is going to come from - and how taxed you'll be - it seems). It was fine.

Today I got a email from the seller (directly... I don't know why they should even have my email address) saying that if I buy this other certain $30 product and give it a good review, they will refund me for it. I'd heard about this method of pumping up product ratings but it's the first time I've been approached to do it. Email contained this gem: "We're sincere and honest, you could trust us."

there is a solution to these amazon issues

I definitely should've shopped around earlier for that person, for one thing, aye

The thing where counter-service restaurants give you a little buzzer to summon you up when your food is ready: at best a mixed bag, and at worst, a backward step. They're greasy and gross to handle, the vibration itself is teeth-rattling and a noise nuisance in the restaurant, plus you have the nervous anticipation of that moment overlapped with an awareness that it might not actually work and you'll fall through the cracks. But also, lately, I find that they buzz a little bit in advance of your order actually being ready, so if you try to comply with them you just end up milling around like a dummy (in an area not really sized to take on a population of buzzer-clutching loiterers) for one to two minutes. On the whole it seems like a pointless and expensive reinvention of the wheel, and a Dud.

hah yeah I find them annoying. Fuddruckers uses them

If you choose to eat at Fuddruckers they assume you're a masochist

Haha I was gonna say

I hate those things. Just use a bell and shout out the number.

I like the flaws of all of the systems of calling out orders, most of which are the fault of the customer.

If you call out someone's order number off their receipt - everybody stares blindly at you not knowing where to find it, half of them threw away their receipt moments after getting it, then you wind up screaming what the order is and the same three people ordered the same thing so they all go up to the front.

if you call out someone's name, you get two people with the same name come up and now you gotta figure out which one is the right one. one time I placed an order at a Firehouse and went to pick it up and they gave me this gigantic order that was way more than I ordered, cos the guy who went to pick up an Uber Eats order also had the same name as me so they gave him mine, and me his. it was funny.

if you use the buzzer, people get annoyed like stated above.

If you scream BITCH GET YOUR GODDAMN FUCKIN' FOOD, you get fired.

in conclusion fast food should not exist.

in britain everybody just apologises and starves

those buzzers buzz REALLY HARD.

also people put them in their pants

The proliferation of potato chips as a side is my personal consumer fraud crusade

When I waited tables in the late 90s, at one restaurant they made us carry those buzzers in our aprons so we’d know when our orders were ready. Regardless of how alert I was (it varied) I was always caught off guard by the intense sensation of that buzz.

fan of the buzzers. It’s ideal when places are loud and buzzy and have multiple stalls. You can go wait wherever you want and claim a table instead of standing around listening.

Some just light up and don't buzz

Feel like the buzzers came in right around the same time diners started waiting outside since they couldn't smoke at the bar any more.

I also don't like places that take your number and text you when your table is ready. I don't want to have to keep checking my phone. We went to a restaurant with my mother-in-law and she got there first so she gave them her number. They said it would be about half an hour. After sitting in a waiting area inside the restaurant for about 25 minutes I went up to the front to see how much longer it would be, and they told me they texted us 10 minutes ago. My mother in law is not the most tech savvy person but there were no texts on her phone. Maybe they had the number wrong.

I remember them from a long time ago at Outback?

I worked at an Olive Garden in high school. When I hosted we always had waits of 30-45-60 minutes. I would've killed to have had buzzers. Instead we would have to come up with bland descriptions of people to later try to find them for their table. Because of course people had used completely offensive descriptions of people before and the people had seen it written down.

Somebody wrote "Tattoos" to describe me on a check one. Before i had ink it was probably "Ugly".

*once

i mean i'm navigating the virgin media phone call decision tree and am now in a queue listening to Niall Horan forever after having been transferred twice between departments. somehow this feels... not good. i mean i recognise the cost savings, though let's say i'm not convinced these are passed on to the customers.