Original post on federate.social

Figuring out how to call #Intuit on the phone to get this fixed was a whole other saga. TLDR the phone number is 800-446-8848 in case you need it.
I used their chatbot to get that number. It gave me four different wrong/inapplicable answers before I finally coerced the right answer out of it […]

#TechIsShitDispatch
This is what I see in #Intuit #TurboTax for Windows when I attempt to enter my W-2 wages for last year.
It's going to be tough doing my taxes with TurboTax if I can't enter my wages!
P.S. I wrote a little script to blur last year's wages […]

[Original post on federate.social]

Error box in red: "No more than 2 choice(s) may be answered."

After sending me multiple emails per week for months trying to get me to switch from to the web version of #TurboTax, #Intuit decided they would make one final push in the desktop app itself, inviting me to try the web version for free after I installed and […]

[Original post on federate.social]

Original post on federate.social

#TechIsShitDispatch
When I tell #Gemini on my #GooglePixel #Android phone (yes, I use Gemini; I had it disabled but then I couldn't give any meaningful voice commands to #AndroidAuto, and that's a safety issue, so although I f*cking hate that #Google broke Android Auto without Gemini, I had to […]

Hello Jonathan, Thank you for reaching out to WIRED customer care. My name is Allen, and I’m glad to assist you. I want to personally apologize for the delayed response due to high volume of emails. We truly appreciate your patience. I understand your frustration regarding the conflicting information you’ve received and the difficulty in updating your email address. I sincerely apologize for the confusion and inconvenience this experience has caused, especially after multiple attempts to resolve the issue. I completely understand how this has impacted your trust, and I want to assure you that I’m committed to resolving this matter to your satisfaction. I’m happy to confirm that your account email address has now been successfully updated to your preferred email. This means you should be able to access your account using the updated email address. If you happen to encounter any issues logging in, I recommend using the “forgot password” option to ensure your access is fully restored under the correct email. Please note that you may also update or make necessary changes on your account in the manage account section when logged in. If you'd like to rejoin us in the future we’d love to welcome you back—click here for a special offer created just for you. Please don't hesitate to reach out if there is anything else we can do to assist or if you have any further questions. For the fastest support, chat with us anytime. Thank you for contacting WIRED. Best regards, Allen

This would be hilarious if it weren't so GOD DAMNED FRUSTRATING. I don't know what you "updated" or how, but THERE ARE STILL TWO SEPARATE ACCOUNTS FOR ME ON YOUR WEBSITE, UNDER THE TWO DISTINCT EMAIL ADDRESSES. NOTHING HAS CHANGED. Please tell me the truth: am I interacting with human beings in these email interactions, or with a chatbot who isn't actually able to solve my problem so you just keep lying to me and telling me it's solved when you haven't actually done anything? I will ask again what I asked in my last message to you: is there a human being there who I can interact with who will actually understand and be able to resolve my problem?

Customer Name: Jonathan Kamens Customer Email: [blurred]@anonaddy.com Concern: Frustration over incorrect support responses and inability to update email; duplicate accounts confusion Resolution: Confirmed email address successfully updated; advised login and password reset if needed

#TechIsShitDispatch
This morning I got back a third response from #WIRED's customer support claiming once again that the problem was fixed, when once again it is not fixed and in fact nothing has changed.
At this point, I'm not sure whether it makes a […]

[Original post on federate.social]

Original post on federate.social

#TechIsShitDispatch I emailed WIRED support and asked how to replace the email address on my account.
They wrote back: "I have removed the old email address from your account and successfully updated it to …. This means your account is no longer associated with the compromised email address." […]

Original post on federate.social

#TechIsShitDispatch
I am renewing my uncle's Medicaid through NYC. I've filled out the renewal application, and now it needs me to upload documents.
1) It says the only way I can upload the documents is through a mobile app. What the actual fuck.
2) My uncle does not pay a premium on his […]

Original post on federate.social

#TechIsShitDispatch #Microslop
I just dismissed a reminder from #MicrosoftOutlook for #macOS. The reminder disappeared from the pop-up, but the pop-up itself remained. Neither clicking the "Dismiss" button nor clicking the red circle in the title bar made the window go away.
About 30 seconds […]

#TechIsShitDispatch the two tabs which I keep always pinned in #Vivaldi just spontaneously unpinned themselves and refused to let me repin them. I had to close both tabs, reopen their websites in new tabs, and then pin those new tabs. 🤔

Original post on federate.social

#TechIsShitDispatch This morning my son's Pixel phone claimed there was debris or liquid in the USB port and disabled it. This is a great feature, when it works.
But there was no visible debris, and the message eventually went away, but
after that it would only charge from one particular charger […]

Original post on federate.social

The problem with Uncle's mail forwarding, which a postal supervisor told me a month ago would be fixed, has not been.
Uncle's mail continues to be put into his mailbox at his apartment instead of being forwarded to me.
I just filed a new complaint with the USPS about this.
While doing that their […]

Original post on federate.social

#TechIsShitDispatch
I'm on the #Zappos website trying to add a credit card to pay for an order. I open the form for doing that and then click the #1Password button in the form field to bring up the menu of credit cards stored in 1Password for me to choose which one to auto-fill. The credit card […]

#TechIsShitDispatch
At #Costco's website this morning, they apparently do not want to actually sell me the products they have listed for sale on the website.

If it's not hearing loss, then maybe it's yet another item for my #TechIsShitDispatch: voice-mail prompts that are supposed to be be playing tones that people can actually here, aren't, on a regular basis. *sigh*

Original post on federate.social

#Medium: Hi! Thanks for visiting. You have to create a free account to read this article.
Me: [creates account]
Medium, 5 minutes later: Thanks for creating your account! Here's some #spam.
Me: [unsubscribes]
Medium, a day later: Ha! You only unsubscribed from one kind of spam, here's a […]

Original post on federate.social

#TechIsShitDispatch
I needed to edit a recurring calendar event in #MicrosoftOutlook for #macOS.
I opened the event for editing, but when I tried to edit the recurrence, it just… wouldn't let me. No error, no explanation, the fields _looked_ editable, but I wasn't allowed to make changes.
Other […]

Original post on federate.social

#TechIsShitDispatch
Every. Single. Day. We are forced to put up with shitty design, shitty quality, shitty service.
A couple years ago my wife and I bought a #ClassicKitchen hot water urn. Classic Kitchen is a boutique company which sells primarily to observant Jews, primarily products […]

Original post on federate.social

#TechIsShitDispatch
I tried to subscribe to a newsletter on #Beehiiv using a privacy-protecting #Addyio address. Beehiiv lets me subscribe, or at least seems to. It even lets me sign up for a paid subscription under that email address and happily takes my money. But I'm not actually receiving […]

It should not be this hard to run SQL queries on some data I’m doing some simple analysis of some data at work in a spreadsheet with about 8,000 rows, essentially to decide which rows I care about and which I can ignore. My first attempt at this involved many iterations of “build a filter filter in LibreOffice Calc to match certain rows I know I can ignore, delete those rows, resetting the filter, repeat.” After several hours of this I got myself down to about 4,000 rows remaining before realizing that some rows I’d decided to delete quite a ways earlier in the process, I really should have kept. Oh, well, time to start over. This time I decided to be smart about it: instead of doing this analysis in Calc and deleting rows, let’s load the data into something I can run SQL queries on and write a query with lots of where clauses to exclude the rows I don’t want. This way, if I realize part-way in that I made a mistake, I can simply modify the query instead of having to start over. My first thought for how to accomplish this was that we’re a Microsoft 365 shop, so I can just load the data into Microsoft Access. Apparently not: it’s not installed on my work laptop, not available in the Jamf self-service software install app, and not available to me for download (as far as I can tell) on the Microsoft 365 website, so either the M365 account my company gave me does not have a license for Access, or Microsoft has cunningly hidden the installer somewhere. I have now run into my first 🚧. Time to change course! At this point I remembered that LibreOffice Database exists, i.e., LibreOffice has a free tool kind of like Microsoft Access. So I’m going to try to use that. If I just wanted to run read-only SQL queries against the data in the spreadsheet, my problem would be solved here. It’s trivial to connect a LibreOffice Database to an existing ODS file and run SQL queries against it. But I also want to be able to _edit_ the underlying data, and ODS-backed LibreOffice databases are read-only. I’m therefore hoping there’s an easy way to copy a table from one LibreOffice database into another, so I can create a read-write database backed by HSQLDB, which is supported by LibreOffice Database, and do my querying and editing in that. I do a bit of web searching, from which I conclude that the recommended way to do this is to create a LibreOffice Database connected to the spreadsheet, create a second Database connected to the HSQLDB backend, copy the table in the first database, and paste it into the second. I create the Database connected to the spreadsheet with no trouble, but when I try to create and open the HSQL Database, I get a pop-up telling me I have to go install a JDK. 🚧#2 I go download and install OpenJDK, which requires some digging around to figure out the correct way to do that on macOS. The first time I do it it doesn’t work, it turns out because I should have installed the “aarch64” version on my silicon Mac rather than the “x64” version. D’oh! 🚧#3. I delete the x64 version I installed and replace it with the aarch64 version, and now I’m able to open the HSQLDB Database. Now I attempt the table copy/paste maneuver, and I get errors at the point where LibreOffice is attempting to copy the data into the new table. I waste quite some time digging into what is causing these errors, only to discover that for some inexplicable reason LibreOffice is ignoring the data in the first column of source data and shifting all the data one column to the left, with the result that the data is being imported into the wrong columns, which means the data types of the columns and the data being imported into them don’t match, which is what’s causing the errors. 🚧#4 I don’t know how to work around this, but it seems like a pretty serious bug, so I should try to construct a simple test case and report it to the LibreOffice maintainers, right? Only when I attempt to do that, I run into a _different_ bug, which I can’t figure out how to work around. I report that one instead. 🚧#5. Since I can’t get past that bug, I can’t create a recipe for reproducing the other one, so I can’t report it. 🙁 My next thought is that maybe this problem is only in the HSQLDB backend, so I can install MariaDB on my Mac and use that as the backend instead of HSQLDB. I’ve never actually installed MariaDB on a Mac before, but it should be straightforward, right? Alas, the MariaDB install page only says how to install it on Linux and Windows, not Mac. 🚧#6. I’m sure if I had kept digging I could have found a way to install it on my Mac (heck, it’s probably available in Homebrew, which I forgot to check), but I just shrugged and figured what the heck, I’ll use PostgreSQL instead. I found, downloaded, and ran the macOS PostgreSQL installer. During the install it said that database initialization failed but didn’t explain why. 🚧#7 I haven’t actually installed PostgreSQL in a long time, so it took me some digging to refresh my memory about how to initialize the database from the command line, but I figured it out. Then more digging to figure out how to create users and set their passwords, then some more digging to figure out how to give them permissions on the database. Permissions are quite arcane on PostgreSQL, so it took me quite a while to figure it out, and then I subsequently realized in hindsight that all that effort was pointless because `initdb` enables trust authentication for anybody connecting through localhost. 🚧#8 While I was in the middle of figuring out how to assign permissions I saw someone on Stack Overflow recommend using pgAdmin for that, so I figured what the heck, I’ll give that a try. My friends, I have a powerful MacBook Pro, and pgAdmin took several minutes to launch. Furthermore, after it launched, the user interface took anywhere from 3 to 10 seconds to respond to every single mouse click. I don’t know what tech pgAdmin is built out of under the hood, but wow, it is absurdly, unusably slow. Also, it turns out you can only use pgAdmin to assign permissions for existing objects; you can’t use it to assign default permissions, apparently. So all that effort was wasted. 🚧#9 Now that I’ve got the database working, I create a LibreOffice Database connected to it, and then I again attempt to do the table copy/paste from the ODS-connected Database. The entire process of doing that works as expected and seemingly runs to completion, but… the table is not created. LibreOffice is acting like nothing’s wrong but silently failing. I report that bug too. 🚧#10 “Maybe it will work if I create the table in the target database by hand, and then attempt to do the paste in ‘append the data’ mode, I say to myself. So I try that with a simple test case before I waste time recreating the entire schema of my actual data in the target database. It fails, because the primary key column created by LibreOffice isn’t auto-populating so the INSERT statement generated by LibreOffice fails because it’s not providing a value for that column. I reported that as well. 🚧#11 You get how absurd all this is, right? Next thought: create the table with hand-written SQL with a proper PostgreSQL serial primary key, _then_ append the data from the source table. I try that out with my tiny test table, and lo and behold, it works. So I go ahead and do the same for the actual table schema and data, and, miraculously, that works as well, and I finally have all the data in a LibreOffice Database that I can query and edit. It only took me the majority of a work day. 🤦 But wait, there’s more. I continue to discover issues as I use LibreOffice Database to query and edit the data: * I’m building complex queries. To make the queries readable as I work my way through the data, I’m inserting line breaks, SQL comments, etc. I don’t discover until the first time I close and later reopened one of these queries that when you close a query it strips out all the line breaks and SQL comments. Awesome! Reported as a bug. 😡 🚧#12 * When you edit a row in the query results and then rerun the query before clicking on a different row or clicking the data save button, your changes are silently discarded. This bug cost me about 45 minutes because when I realized it was happening I had to go back and re-review over a thousand rows of data to find the ones that hadn’t been saved properly. Reported as a bug. 🚧#13 It’s unbelievable how hard this was to do and how many barriers to success I had to get through. ### Share this: * Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * Share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn * Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit * Share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon * ### _Related_

It should not be this hard to run SQL queries on some data

I had to push my way through 13 barriers to success to do this seemingly simple thing.

blog.kamens.us/2026/03/15/it-should-not...

When you get a chance please change the [blurred] DMARC record: WS-25GO:~!502$ host -t txt _dmarc.[blurred].com _dmarc.[blurred].com descriptive text "v=DMARC1; p=none; pct=100; rua=mailto:[blurred]@dmarc.postmarkapp.com; sp=none; aspf=r;" To this: _dmarc.[blurred].com descriptive text "v=DMARC1; p=none; pct=100; rua=mailto:[blurred]@dmarc.postmarkapp.com; ruf=mailto:[blurred].com; sp=none; aspf=r;" The addition is in bold.

When you get a chance please change the [blurred] DMARC record: WS-25GO:~!502$ host -t txt _dmarc.[blurred].com _dmarc.[blurred].com descriptive text "v=DMARC1; p=none; pct=100; rua=[blurred]@dmarc.postmarkapp.com; sp=none; aspf=r;" To this: _dmarc.[blurred].com descriptive text "v=DMARC1; p=none; pct=100; rua=[blurred]@dmarc.postmarkapp.com; ruf=[blurred].com; sp=none; aspf=r;" > Signature

A #TechIsShitDispatch tale in two screenshots:
On the left: a screenshot of the email I sent to #Jira Service Desk to ask our IT team to make a DNS change.
On the right: how that email look when it landed in the Jira ticket.
Two rather important differences […]

[Original post on federate.social]

#TechIsShitDispatch
I did a quick trip to the supermarket today for a few things for lunch. Well, it was _supposed_ to be quick, but of course nothing ever is when technology is involved! (1/3)

Screenshot of Garmin Connect app with none of the data that's supposed to be there showing up. All the widgets are blank.

#GarminConnect recently stopped importing calories eaten from #MyFitnessPal. This breakage coincided with #Garmin introducing a new, premium (paid) feature for importing nutrition information into Connect, making me and others suspect they broke the basic […]

[Original post on federate.social]

Original post on federate.social

I was able to regain access to Uncle's #Hilton Honors account after an hour and a half on the phone with Hilton.
The first call lasted 56 minutes and perhaps would have eventually been successful if it hadn't suddenly disconnected. So I had to call back and start over, which took a bit less time […]

Original post on federate.social

#TechIsShitDispatch
While cleaning up Uncle's old email I discover he has a ton of Hilton Honors points, which he can't use anymore but I can when going to NYC to help him.
(I won't give Hilton money after their capitulation to ICE, but I will gladly use their rooms for free!)
To do this, I need […]

RE: https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/116162189190780232

#TechIsShitDispatch

Original post on federate.social

#TechIsShitDispatch
My motorcycle loan was from #GreenwoodCreditUnion. I wanted to pay it off via ACH transfer.
Most banks can do transfers in one business day. But Greenwood? Nope! They don't support Zelle or FedNow, and their ACH transfers take at least three days to go through. It appears […]

Original post on federate.social

#TechIsShitDispatch
I regularly place large orders of a particular variety of tea from the Twinings website, because it's pretty much the only variety I drink and it's often hard to find in grocery stores.
Shipping is supposed to be free for orders over $50.
When I went to order tea several days […]

Original post on federate.social

#TechIsShitDispatch
I receive marketing #spam from Thrift Savings Plan, a.k.a. #TSP, the 401k-like thing that federal government employees participate in.
I've never been particularly interested in TSP spam, but I tolerated it while I was a participant. However, DOGE fired me a year ago and I'm […]

Alert Profile on Hold Your account has been placed on hold because we could not verify your identity. Call (401) 739-4600 to remove the hold.

Decided to pay off my Greenwood Credit Union motorcycle loan from my home equity line at my main bank, since the interest rate on the HELOC is lower and likely to stay that way given what the fed has been doing.
Went through all the rigmarole to add my main […]

[Original post on federate.social]

Original post on federate.social

#TechIsShitDispatch¹
Yesterday I suddenly found myself unable to log into my bank's web portal. Whenever I tried to log in, it claimed my session was closed because I was idle, or I already had an active session, or both (!!).
I was able to log in from a new profile created to test this. I was […]