Life With Technology: Doing our Best With an Imperfect System!

As I sit here writing this post, I find myself also reflecting on the general "brokenness" of the Steemit web site at the moment, it occurred to me that our community's woes is by no means unique in its troubles.

Just here in our household, we have somewhat extensively battled "websites with problems" all weekend long! It's really a pretty common thing...

Even e-commerce giant eBay — which I use extensively to sell off both our own excess stuff, as well as for a couple of my businesses — was having troubles today.

For example, it was unable to accept the upload of photographs for a while. And every time I wanted to change a shipping policy for an item, the changes wouldn't take effect... unless I first listed the item with the wrong shipping amount and then went back afterwards and edited it.

Here we're talking about a venue with millions of active users, many of whom are depending on site functionality for their livelihoods!

Later, I was trying to make a payment on a credit card website earlier — for a payment that was due today — and the payment gateway wouldn't allow me first to log in for at least a couple of hours, and then (once I had logged in) I couldn't select "today" as the payment date... even though I was many hours ahead of the deadline.

This meant I had to forget about making the payment online, and instead had to get on the phone only to be on hold for half an hour, in order to make the payment with a live agent, in person!

Our 30-something son was here for a few days, and he's a big time gamer. Even though we have about 900 mbps Internet he kept getting kicked out of his game by a message that he "wasn't connected." We ran all manners of diagnostics on our network, and everything was working as it was supposed to... except — evidently — some part of the controller managing the data stream for his gameplay.

Upstairs, Mrs. Denmarkguy was trying to work and doing some editing on her TeeSpring website/shop that she uses to sell merchandise for her nonprofit organization, and she found herself unable to update the header image for her shop. She kept uploading an image — exactly according to the site instructions and specifications — but every time the shop header would end up displaying just one quarter of the image.

Eventually, she ended up having to have a lengthy email exchange with customer support, at the end of which they finally admitted that they were chasing a bug in their code since a recent interface update.

I guess I am writing these words because we get frustrated when we encounter "stuff not working," but it's a remarkably common occurrence, these days... even for very large organizations, let alone for a more modest venue like Steemit.

Welcome to the Technology Maze!

As I contemplated our technical difficulties, I found myself increasingly recognizing the fact that we live in an age where technology gets more and more advanced — and thus, complex — and we have more and more different apps trying to communicate with each other... and there are more and more millions of lines of code trying to be compatible.

Sometimes it's actually a miracle that things do work properly, from time to time!

Back in the days when I worked in IT, we used to call new releases "Plug and PRAY," rather than "Plug and play..."

Much as we'd like to think that we are advancing and getting more and more sophisticated with our technology, sometimes we have to realize that it doesn't take much of a bug in the system in order for a whole lot of stuff to start going sideways!

Of course I wish Steemit were working properly, but I'm also enough of a realist not to get too frustrated with it... and be willing to use workarounds to still making using our community usable.

To that end, I do strongly recommend that you use @steemchiller's Steemworld.org helper app to help check your posts and comments, and to see whether someone has mentioned you, or left you a comment to act on! It makes life a lot easier!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great week ahead!

How about you? Do you often encounter "technical issues" with web sites? Do they frustrate you, or do you take it in stride? Have you ever considered how much of a miracle it is that all this technology actually works together? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2024.03.10 23:41 PST
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