Five more tech challenges
Tuesday, 25 November 2014I posted earlier in the month about how there seems to be some new ‘tech challenge’ almost every day. OK, here are 5 more of them:
• Once you’ve subscribed to a magazine it’s a race to see how soon they can suggest you resubscribe. Of course when they make their resubscription offers they never show when your current subscription expires. Time Magazine are particularly good at this, I recently had a resubscribe offer when my current subscription expires not this year (2014) or even next year (2015), but not until 2016! OK – they admitted when I queried this – we were just trying to fool you into renewing two years early, we promise we won’t bother you again. A week later there’s a Time Magazine query ‘didn’t you get our special renewal offer?’
• On the other hand The Age – the Melbourne, Australia daily – has twice in the past month contacted me to ask why I’d let my monthly print and digital subscription expire when in fact it hadn’t expired at all.
◄ Maureen’s just got a new car – a Mini – which had a fault with the exterior mirror covers. The new mirror covers were sent from the UK (where Minis are made), which I suggest should only take a week. ‘Not a week unfortunately, more like a month,’ I was told. OK, so it takes BMW (they own Mini, and Rolls-Royce for that matter) a month to get something from the UK to Australia.
On the other hand Maureen orders something from Net-a-Porter, and before she’s shut down her computer and folded down the screen there’s a knock at the front door as it’s delivered. Sometimes from England, sometimes from Hong Kong and only a slight exaggeration. Do BMW need to talk to Net-a-Porter about how to do things really fast? ►
• Why is it near impossible to change addresses online? In that last tech challenge posting I commented on how changing my Apple iTunes account was an incredibly difficult process. Expensive too, some stuff simply disappeared off my iPad and I had to buy it again. This time it was Starwood Hotels where it took multiple website visits to make a simple address and credit card change. And as for Lloyds Bank!
• I hate hotels which charge – particularly when they charge like a wounded rhino – for Wi-Fi. The most recent example was at the Westin Sydney (a delightful hotel, a couple of quibbles like this apart). Now it’s no problem for me in Australia, I can access emails on my smart phone and if I need to do something on my tablet or laptop I can set up a Wi-Fi hotspot from the phone. But for overseas visitors liable for roaming charges that can be a real financial hit. Of course these days there’s often lots of free Wi-Fi available, even if it’s not in your hotel. Here in Melbourne Federation Square, the State Library and The Wheeler Centre are all good places to go!
In high tech Germany it’s a different question. A recent German study revealed that per 10,000 population Gemany has only 1.9 free hotspots – versus 4.8 in the US, 29 in the UK and 37 in South Korea. You can’t even get free Wi-Fi in the Reichstag. Angela Markel says she’s going to do something about it. A principal reason for the poor coverage is a German law which makes Wi-Fi providers responsible for wrongdoings (like illegal downloads) by anybody who uses their systems.
