Goodbye, cruel world!
Give me strength! The vagaries of modern technology get occasional mentions on this organ but I’m seemingly under near-constant attack at the moment. Within the pages of the glossy supplements and technology magazine programmes we learn about the coming joys of artificial intelligence – robot girlfriends, permanent leisure for the great unwashed as factories of never-tired machines produce all our necessities including automatic bricklaying – and a perfect life in which we all live in futuristic homes piping endless television channels and online delights to our wall-sized televisions.
Meanwhile back in the real world things are a little different.
Yesterday I listened to a Radio Five programme in which listeners queued up to tell tales of rustic broadband services slower than the old dial-up internet that we used to love in the 1990s. You know, the one that took so long to download anything that we could nip off, prepare and then eat a three-course meal before returning to our computers only to find the damned thing still only halfway through its process. Good old BT Openreach!
I’ve having a bad run of it recently. I’ve not long negotiated a new sooper-dooper deal with my broadband supplier Virgin Media including the very latest speeds etc., the only drawback being that, at least three times a day, my internet service connection goes down for an hour or more at a time. There’s nothing like urgently needing to go online to look up an address of somewhere so that you can programme it into your car sat-nav system in order to be sure of getting to the right place, only to be faced with the reality that you cannot technically access what should really be at your fingertips 24/7.
Next item to begin playing up has been my printer. Twice over the weekend I was concentrating hard in order to draft two very important documents – spent the best part of half a day on them – and then, when I went to print them off, on the first occasion my desktop computer announced that it had ‘lost’ its connection to my printer. Nothing I could think of trying would prompt it to reconnect and in the end I just had to give up. On the second, I did everything as per the manual, pressed the ‘print’ button … and nothing happened for half an hour, despite repeated attempts to get the damned thing to spew out a hard copy. Then, in its own time, of course, it finally decided off its own bat to print the blessed item (three times).
Oh for the good old days of typewriters and paper!
Yesterday was practically the final straw (I say ‘practically the final’ because there are still another five days to go before I get to next weekend).
Without any warning my software protector McAfee WebAdvisor [its technical title is ‘LiveSafe’] suddenly decided – without any act whatsoever by me – to ‘add’ a line advertising itself to the top of my online screen. That’s the first thing I object to – the fact that some external organisation, commercial or otherwise, can randomly at any time of its choosing ‘take over’ your computer and affect your quiet enjoyment of your own devices.
I saw an advertisement once about a development of a brand new, artsy-fartsy housing estate featuring neat three-storey townhouses and apartments that was being built a couple of miles from where I live. Out of both curiosity and boredom I then made the fatal error of clicking on the ‘link’ and giving myself a 3D tour of one of the show townhouses further to a quiet fantasy I was having about cashing in my home and imagining myself moving there, or indeed to something like it.
Since then, every time I visit a newspaper website, I get what I’d describe as ‘tailored’ or ‘targeted’ advertisements appearing in every article I then choose to read. Clearly, the property developer concerned has tapped into some kind of marketing facility that modern technology has given it whereby they ‘send’ follow-up reminders to anyone who has visited their website on this new development. I’d love to ‘switch off’ this intrusion upon my privacy but have yet to discover the means by which to do it, if indeed it exists.
But back to my friendly software protector, McAfee WebAdvisor.
This newly-arrived ‘band’ across the top of my online screen sits neatly above where the Google ‘box’ into which you’d normally tap the name or title of the search you are trying to make. Apart from announcing that it is from McAfee WebAdvisor, this band does nothing else but obscure what is above it on the screen.
The first item of which is the ‘box’ into which, once you’ve made one Google search, you would subsequently expect to type the identity of a second search. And there is no means whatsoever – that is, as far as I can determine, to remove the McAfee WebAdvisor band.
In other words, the effect of this McAfee WebAdvisor band across the top of my screen is that, if I ever want to do a second or subsequent search on Google, I have to all intents and purposes place my on-screen cursor at the very bottom of the Google ‘box’, click on it, backspace to the left as far as I can … and then type in the title of the search I wish to conduct completely blind. Because the McAfee Anti-Virus band completely obscures what I am typing!
So far I’ve tried everything I can think of in order to cure the problem by ‘removing’ the McAfee WebAdvisor band from the top of my online screen … and failed. It is driving me nuts.
I now have to spend my days squinting at the two-thirds obscured Google search ‘box’ at the top of my page, trying to work out what is in there and what I’ve been typing so far. I’m left resorting to this because, as far as I can tell, there is no way I can find of getting rid of the McAfee WebAdvisor. I’ve even been on the McAfee website, searching for some contact telephone number which I can call in order to ask how the hell I can remove their band (or banner thingy) and I cannot even find a number to call!
I can’t yet tell whether this is all some form of Big Brother ruse in order to try and annoy the hell out of me or whether, as an oldie, I’m just in the middle of a run of bad luck.
Call me paranoid if you wish, but all I do in my life is try to avoid bothering other people and avoid other people bothering me. But to realise even that unremarkable quiet personal ambition requires the things I use in my life to ‘work’. How and why this great 21st Century of ever-advancing progress we’re all living in cannot even guarantee that completely escapes me.
[POSTSCRIPT:
Would you ‘Adam and Eve’ it – and you just couldn’t make this sort of thing up! I rose from my bed this morning at exactly 1.40am, made myself a black coffee, came to my computer and then did my normal thing, i.e. trawl around the newspaper websites, write a couple of emails and then compose this post in a Word document. When the time came to physically ‘post’ it to this organ (3.47am) – my broadband service announced that the internet had ‘gone down’, thus thwarting my plan. I shall now have to wait until I have gone back to bed and awoken for the second time this morning in order to post it. Thanks, Big Brother – oh, and by the way, two fingers to you as well ……….]
