Corporate IT “Support”

Suppose you have a problem on your company laptop, for which you contact #CorporateIT, using Microsoft Teams. Now, you’re already logged in as yourself, in Teams, but the first thing they always ask is to confirm that it’s… you, who is contacting them. Then they always ask whether you’re at a company site or home, and what your phone number is. Now, about 90% of everyone is working from home, and with the VPN, it wouldn’t matter anyway. Also, they have no need to call you on the phone. In the rare event they want to use voice, they’ll just use Teams!

So, given the lag of getting a person from the queue, and the normal flow of question and response, you’re about 5-10-15 minutes into the process, and you have wasted the entire time by answering three stupid questions. But if you don’t respond in about 10 seconds, you’ll be badgered with, “Are we still connected?”

After your chat, you’ll get prompted to rate support’s “help” in Teams, and then you’ll get about a dozen emails — whether or not they helped you in any way — including ANOTHER prompt to rate their helpfulness. And they are judged on this. I once rated a support tech poorly, because he was completely unhelpful, and didn’t even try to escalate the problem. He contacted me back to argue about it, and couldn’t disagree with my rating, but pleaded with me to change it, because that’s how they stay employed. I did, but I just don’t bother with the ratings any more.

Our Lives are Run by Bad Software: Discord Edition

A friend invites me to a watch a stream of him playing a game on Discord. I’m not at my computer, so I install the app on my iPad. It asks for credentials, but the login process doesn’t seem to work with 1Password. So I open 1Pass, remember the email I need to type, and copy the password.

I log in on the Discord app, and it puts me through some CAPTCHA thing, and then tells me this is a new device, that needs to be “registered” or something, and sends me an email. I click the link, and a Safari window opens… and goes nowhere. It’s gotten blocked by 1Blocker.

So I copy-paste the URL into Firefox — where I do NOT have an ad blocker, for precisely these scenarios — and it asks me to log in again. Again, 1Password is unhelpful. Again, it sends me through a CAPTCHA…

And I say to myself, you know what? I don’t care any more. I don’t want to see it now. And I close all the browser tabs and I remove Discord from my device, and I complain about it on Twitter.

I go through this ridiculous, digital dance with various services, every single day. EVERY. DAY. I’m sick of it. And I’m just going to stop using every service under the sun, just because they’re free. There’s NOTHING in Discord worth this level of “security” to me.

So, alright, Discord, keep your secrets.