Are all the latest technology toys worth the trouble? One reader recently explained why he's decided to just stop using broadband, PDAs, high-end cell phones and on-line bill payment.
"Essentially -- if anything has to talk to anything else -- I avoid it," the reader wrote. "Because it won't. Or it won't without a lot of coaxing. Or an upgrade. Or a separate service charge. Or the moon being in the right phase, you standing on the left foot, and reciting Shakespeare. In fact, a lot of my 'time saving tools' have been costing so much time spent fixing glitches caused by 'computer errors' on the part of software or the institution that I've dropped:
"High Speed Internet: The time spent downloading or uploading mid sized files on dial-up is now exceeded by the time spent downloading and installing the latest fixes and patches to keep out viruses I never had to worry about when using dial-up. Cost? Don't go there.
"PDAs: I loved my PDA -- but problems using it with the Outlooks address book always put me traveling, out in the middle of nowhere, only to find the latest update before I left wrote gibberish all over my travel instruction to where I was going, or over critical contacts. So now my contact file is back in Word, where I have total freedom with the fields and can see what I'm getting. Besides, the PDAs are getting outlawed at many of the facilities I visit, due to camera concerns (mine doesn't have one, but tell that to the sixth grade graduate behind the security desk).
"High-End Cell phones: No longer do I go for the high end with features, modem capability, and programmability. I get the basic phone. You spend more time trying to learn a new entry system, menu structure, etc every eighteen months or so than the features save you. (Not to mention the cost of the cables, software, etc.) Now I enter the number and punch whatever button I need to call."
"Online bill payment: The time spent recently correcting an error by the electronic transfer company -- which modified an electronic address on its own initiative, and sent the money elsewhere -- cost me over $300 in fees and interest charges that I never recovered and more time and phone effort than I would have spent if I had written checks for the last two years.
The reader, who works at a major scientific research institution, is not a Luddite. "I am well accustomed to making disparate devices talk to one another," he notes. " I started off in college hybridizing a Minuteman missile warhead and an AD5 computer. I did robotics design. It's not that I can't make it work, it's just too time consuming, and I no longer have the time to kill. And the lack of reliability for all of this stuff -- it fails when you can least afford the cost or the delay -- has caused me to shift reliance to less susceptible methods. Let the kids play with it. The business people aren't using it anymore for the reasons above, and no longer pay for it. Meanwhile, the software companies, secure in the knowledge they have us by the short hairs, blindly move forward with consumer exploitation approaches that will bring the whole industry down around them. . One of the reasons the economy is dropping is that new startups can't startup, because of all the new laws protecting the established and larger companies. New innovations die in the land of protectionism caused by these laws, and because consumers are finding they don't get what they pay for, and aren't willing to pay for it anymore."
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