captainsblog | Oct. 4th, 2023

It's better than the one I was born into. Mostly. Back then, computers were bigger than buildings and slower than molasses, at least compared to what a chip in even a key fob can do now. They're smaller and faster, but we're still in charge. Today, anyway.

Not that they're not trying. Not just attempts to create artificial intelligence to simulate and maybe replace humans, but incorporating them into a radical change in the model of day to day business. The old way went like this: you needed or wanted something, you paid for it and it was yours. In limited cases, typically periodicals where the need or want was predictable on a schedule and the price the same each time, you would "subscribe" and get the material daily, weekly or monthly.

One of my first paying jobs involved this very business model, but it was much lower on the tech scale. In my teenage years, I delivered newspapers to houses on and just off Powers Avenue- first the Long Island Press, and then Newsday after the LIP went out of business. My "app" for this purpose was a little notebook- with the names, house numbers and expected compensation from each. I can still remember combinations like 75/25, the charge and usual tip for six day daily delivery, or 125/50 for the people who added the Sunday paper. I can’t remember all the names and house numbers, but I definitely remember some people who were or were not on my list. I am even still friends with a handful. One is a young lady who was my age and in school with me all the way through graduation. She now lives in Maryland and just posted that she and her husband celebrated their 36th anniversary yesterday, exactly a week after we did. (1610 Powers, 125/50. Yep, remember that one;)

Newspapers had already begun their forty-year death spiral not long after I got out of the home delivery business and even before me leaving the reporting business, but the more recent trend in subscription collection has been to get away from point of sale tabulation of weekly amounts. Eleanor and I were among the last maybe 20% of our cohorts to still receive home delivery of our local paper here, until just over a year ago. They'd long before switched to a credit card based system of payment, which also provided the other major component of the new way of doing things. In it, they can increase the price, or decrease the term, any damn time they feel like it. When the monthly cost for just Sunday delivery went from 10 bucks a month to well over 40 in annoying annual increments, we finally said goodbye to our friendly reliable Sunday driver who had been coming to our house for years. (The cable company pulled a similar incremental move on us, and we finally cut the last remnant of that cord a year ago.) We do still have two physically delivered magazine subscriptions, which we pay a decent price to receive, but we constantly have to resist efforts to auto-renew, which will typically tell you can be done as much as 90 days ahead and at whatever price it might be at that time. We’ve turned these off, while they still can be turned off.

Computer things are the same way. I'm coming up on two years with this laptop, when I also received a then-free antivirus subscription. Almost immediately they began nagging me to renew and put it on auto-renew. I did, but didn't, and for months I have had to shut annoying popups reminding me to "accept risk."

At least we stopped paying for AOL dialup. As recently as 2015, when almost every home in America had broadband, over 2 million of them were still paying them to connect over a modem. That number of beeeeeeeeeep-boing-boing-boingers is now in the "low thousands," but there are still over a million dropping at least 10 bucks a month to whoever owns that racket these days for tech support and identity theft services they are probably already paying somebody else for anyway.

Maybe I could use that tech support, though. Here are a bunch of recent stories where we’ve been struggling with the concept of getting what we paid for or getting out of paying for it anymore- the first two of which I’ve recently mentioned here.

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Some of these arrangements are actually decent values if you actually use them. One of those was the Vital Care program that one of the big local biggie boxie pet places has been offering every time we brought the dog in for her quarterly groom. For agreeing to a $24.99 monthly charge (plus tax, course;), they immediately offered 20 percent off that month's grooming cost before tax and tip ($15 or so saving), $15 in reward credits to be used in-store each month, and discounts above that on any food we buy there. (It's supposed to be limited to Pepper's food, but they don't carry her dog food brand and gave me the discount and the credit for the "One Hairball" brand of kibble we buy for the boykitties.) The original deal offered free routine vet visits and discounted vaccinations through their own in-store clinics; they may have gotten pushback on that from local vets, because they now give another $20 in store credit if you bring in a copy of the paid bill from your own doggydoc.

That exam was a couple of weeks ago. I had no idea how to apply for it, assuming it probably would involve taking a screenshot of it and uploading it. I was exactly correct about the "how" part, but when I went to try it on their app this past weekend, there didn't seem to be a place to do it. Two stops in the store yielded nothing more than a customer service phone number. Fortunately, once it got escalated to the right department, it turned out to be a good number. The problem was one I've seen before but only got seriously annoyed by on this occasion. Apps and websites often offer the option of signing up with your Apple or Google credentials if you don't want to give them an independent login or email address. Here's one such beast:

Note: I do not recommend signing up with that moron unless you have to.

The problem arose when I apparently picked the "sign up with Apple" option for the monthly plan. That created an entirely separate record from the email-based app login I was trying to use on the phone. Once I knew that and then logged out and back in, I saw the Magic Portal to upload the vet bill copy, got my 20 bucks of gift card, the accounts were merged on their end, and I'm good to go.

Rather than just bitch about this, I decided to write up what happened and why, and I am bringing it over to their local store so if anybody else runs into this problem in the future, they can help them onsite.

Because who's a good human? I'm a good human.

::wag wag purr purr::

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Another I signed up for at around the same time for around the same price was for fixing this computer and other household electronics, at a place formerly called UBreakIFix. Their main advantage over the plans you get from manufacturers or retailers is that they service on-site; this laptop is still covered, it turns out, under its originally purchased two-year warranty, but any fix would require shipping it back to a factory somewhere, waiting days to weeks for the repair, and having no access to a replacement in the meantime. The problem with this one was the wearing-off of the labels on the most commonly used keys- not a problem since I need not look- but an intermittent sticking of the "e" key that was a bit annoying and seemingly beyond my ability to clean my way out of. They quoted me 200-something to fix, but only 150 if I signed up for their 24.99-plus-tax monthly deal. It allows any of dozens of electronic devices other than phones- so computers, printers, tablets, headphones among things we gots- with no repair costing more than 100 bucks at that point. So, they got a $75 deposit toward the keyboard replacement and the first $27.13 charge just about a month ago. They said the new keyboard would be in within a week and then I'd be without it for just a day.

That was just about a month ago, and I haven't heard boo out of them. I haven't bugged them about it because (a) I been busy, and (b) the sticking problem somehow righted itself and hasn't been a bother. Plus once it's definitely past 30 days, I can start bringing them other things to fix. Still, though, if I did nothing, I'd just be handing them $25 bucks at a time for nothing. Eventually, I might get tired of that arrangement and try to cancel it.

Which gets us to the third story of the Hotel California method of online subscription: you can stop using it any time you like, but you can never leave. Or so it seems.

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I made some fun earlier of old farts who were still handing money to AOL every month that they don't need to. Truth is, I was doing the same thing with Apple, and it was a bitch getting out of doing so.

Twas a time that I had their signature music product, iTunes, on several of my own laptops. I signed up at the time for a program called iTunes Match, which would essentially let you store songs in one virtual place and then access them through any Apple device or program. The date on this effort was 2011, long before clouds became large and affordable. By 2018, paying $25 a year for this was essentially OKBoomer of you, as this article from that year made clear when I finally found it last night:

When streaming services like Spotify came along and offered us huge, on-demand music catalogs for an affordable price, iTunes Match didn’t really make sense anymore. Plus, Apple's own $10 per month streaming service, Apple Music, comes with a feature that works just like iTunes Match. It doesn’t make sense to pay for both Apple Music AND iTunes Match at the same time. (While Apple Music comes with iTunes Match, an iTunes Match subscription does not come with Apple Music.)

But lots of folks are reluctant to cancel iTunes Match, out of fear that doing so would delete some of their library.

Or who, like me, just didn't know how to do so or didn't pay attention to the email about its autorenewal. This year, I did, and likely only did because of an error that came up:

Dear Raymond,

There appears to be a problem with the current payment type for your account. This will prevent the automatic renewal of your subscription to iTunes Match. To avoid interruption of your subscription, and to continue enjoying your entire music collection stored in iCloud from your iOS devices, iTunes, and Apple TV, you will need to update your payment information.

Funny, because I use the same payment method for other things with them. But wait! It's a credit card that expires at the end of this month and I haven't given them the new information for it yet. When I looked into it, and confirmed that I would never use this feature anymore and Eleanor wouldn't, either, I set out to cancel it.

That took close to a day, due to various clusters. I figured the easiest way would be on the phone, which lists your subscriptions, past and present, on one convenient screen. Sure enough, there it was:

Apple TV's fine- it's where we get our Ted Lasso and similar fixes- and the two that show as inactive were ones I got rid of just by clicking that right arrow next to their name. I tried to do that with Match, and got this, over and over and over:

I did some homework, and found you could also do it on a PC, but it had to have iTunes loaded on it. I have assiduously kept that piece-of-shit obsolescence off this laptop because I only use it to rip CDs that then get synced to my phone. This laptop's predecessor, which still works but slooooooooowwwwwwlllllleeeeee, is the only one I have it on. It took on and off efforts between 10 last night and 6 tonight, two Windows Update reboots, finally resorting to Microsoft Edge to connect to an Apple Support article that interfaced with iTunes, and finally I killed the damn thing dead Dead DEAD.

Presumably, a lot of people would have given up and just let the $25 charge go through again. Which, now I think about it, is probably the idea.

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Next, going back to the program at the store formerly known as UBreak, there's Amazon, which now conveniently breaks things for you. Eleanor ingests a daily regimen of well over half a dozen vitamins, supplements and prescriptions. One is a daily mixture of a wheatgrass powder mixed with water and flaxseed oil. We get the water from the tap, but the two others used to come from Wegmans until they cut down their selection, so the powder comes from Whole ~~Paycheck~~ Foods and we order the oily goop from Amazon. It arrived last night- in a securely bubblewrapped, air protected, and unfortunately broken glass bottle. I set out to do the return online. NO RETURNS, the site said.

Would I like to have a chat? Why, yes, I would. And this, at least for now, was my snarky success:

Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up online commerce.

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We'll leave these tales with the one of Eleanor's car, the Hyundai plug-in hybrid, which has its own ways of driving us crazy in addition to driving us places.

A week ago, the check engine light came on. We'd run into this a few months ago while I was driving it. She called, they asked if it was flashing- no, steady- and that downgraded us to an appointment close to a month later. By then the code had cleared on the dash, but it was still in the computer, and they diagnosed and replaced a powertrain part. This time, they asked the same thing- still steady- and they did a little better, getting it in this morning. Or not- because when we brought it in the night before, they had no record of the appointment, and the idiot light had, of course, turned itself off again. Fortunately, she'd taken a photo of the diagostic code that also showed up in her app for the car, and that got them to agree to accept it last night and fix it- under warranty- earlier today. Meanwhile, she is now getting a ton of messages on her phone and in the app about how they hope we bring the car back soon for its next service so we can continue enjoying our driving experience.

At least it's not a Kia. Those messages probably forward direct to the teenage assholes who hotwire and joyride those cars:P