CURSES

• CURSES on the iPhone, not because it has moronized the population, but for several simpler reasons. The keyboard can only be used accurately by a person whose fingers have been replaced by needles. The incessant drive for simplicity in design means that the cryptic control icons "less than", "greater than", "book", "arrow", "different arrow", "arrow in a box", can now be equally indecipherable to people of any culture. But, for no sensible reason, I most hate the fact that, when you check your mail, the legend at the bottom of the screen, which normally says something like "Updated at 4:11pm" changes (eventually) to "Updated just now". It then STAYS THAT WAY for ever and ever. Sometimes. So when you go to check your mail again, two minutes or two days later, the legend may still say "Updated just now." Did I just this moment update it and mysteriously forget? Unlikely. What's so hard about saying the correct time? Why be correct and snazzy for one instant in time, "just now", to avoid the pedantic, but always correct ACTUAL TIME OF UPDATING? You made a mistake, and you won't admit it, and everyone will love you for it, so curses on you.

• CURSES on the BBC World Service Radio. I have had this station playing in the background as a companion in the evenings and sleepless nights. I used to enjoy its distinctive character, its mix of art, discussion, politics, theater, radio plays, although perhaps not so much the recitation of "football" scores or the reviews of cricket games. But over the years, the broadcast has been appallingly degraded. There are occasional half hours where a pleasant show can be heard, but generally the BBC has become yet another Headline News Stuttering service. I even heard some BBC hack explain, in response to a listener's query, that they had conducted a poll, and discovered that their average listener lasted no more than 20 minutes. Therefore, to ensure that they connected with such listeners, they had to repeat themselve as often as possible. And they do, they do. Even on the small scale of 20 minutes, any simpleton would be disgusted by the idiotic and regimented repetition that includes one minute of "here's what's coming" followed by five minutes of "in depth headlines" followed by ten minutes of the exact same headlines with two extra sentences each. Another listener complained about the disappearance of actual entertainment and other things that made the channel unique in favor of machine gun news which is already available on many channels, and the broadcaster responded with the party line that, precisely because there were so many such news channels, that was the arena in which the BBC must compete and to hell with all that tatty old rubbish that no one listens to... It's enough to drive me to our mediocre classical music station.
• CURSES on LinkedIn. I joined, for no reason, ten years ago, and "unjoined" a year later. I continued to get requests from people asking me to link to them. I wrote and said I no longer had an account. A year later, I looked up my account information, and looked up online about how to really really kill your LinkedIn account dead, and took those steps. I still get requests from people. So we may all assume that every person who ever joined LinkedIn ever is now stuck there like a zombie. I sent a request to Adam and Eve, but they still haven't responded. They have a lot of nerve not responding, especially since I'm pretty sure we're related!
• DOUBLE CURSES on LinkedIn. I got a second LinkedIn account, and then I discovered that it was LOCKED, because of "inappropriate usage". I can only assume that it was hacked (their fault, not mine.) When I looked into how to get the account unlocked, I discovered that all I had to do was send them a scan of my passport or government ID. Since they couldn't protect my LinkedIn password, how could I trust them with ANY confidential information. So now I have TWO zombie LinkedIn accounts adding to LinkedIn's subscriber numbers and confusing people who think they can ask me to add them to my page.
• CURSES on American Airlines. I bought a ticket two months in advance. My trip connected to Dallas and then Seoul. When I got to the airport at 5am, it took a while to find an agent, who was startled to think that I imagined I could fly to Dallas, since that connecting flight had been canceled "months ago". No one told me. Since it was 5am in the morning, the agent had enough time (about 45 minutes) to try various schemes which eventually got me to Seoul in just 36 hours, including 10 hours sitting in Las Vegas. It occurred to me, while in Seoul, that I was liable to have as much trouble getting back, and perhaps even more, if for some airliney reason it was decided that since I had missed my official American Airlines flights to Seoul, I was no longer their problem. When I tried to access the American Airlines web site, particularly their "Customer Service" page, I was stunned. It is not unfriendly. It is hostile. It is impossible to find anywhere where you can send email saying "my name is so and so, I am having a problem, can you look into it." So this is simply a decoy site, intended to look enough like a customer service site that by the time you realize that no help is to be had, you are willing to just go away and be disserviced and disrespected at no further cost to them. No doubt, there will be more to this story.
• CURSES (doubled) on American Airlines. I expected to have trouble on my return flight from Seoul to Tallahassee, so instead of arriving three hours early, I arrived six hours early. I discovered that there was no American Airlines counter. Talking to a helpful KAL person, I was told to go to counters J1-J8 for American. Going there, I saw no one, and no signs. Someone else came up to me and told me American Airlines would open a counter at 1pm. So my extra three hours become three extra hours to wait. At 1pm, the American Airlines counter announced they were opening at 1:50pm. Worried about the time, I ran downstairs to return my phone. When I got back 15 minutes later, there were 50 people suddenly in the line (which hadn't actually started moving yet.) But yet another helpful person, noticing I had no bags to check in, helped me with the self-check in process, and I got my tickets, one to Dallas, the second to Tallahassee. It was only an hour or so later, as I was sending my arrival times to a friend that I realized that I was going to arrive in Tallahassee just 12 hours after leaving Seoul. My original itinerary had me arriving in Tallahassee on a flight about four hours later. This seemed remarkable to me, implausible in fact, given that I guessed the flight to Dallas itself would take that long. But, of course, my boarding pass to Dallas did not list my arrival time. Only when my friend suggested that you could check flights online was I able to discover that, yes indeed, I was landing in Dallas at 4:30pm, and taking off for Tallahassee at 2:10pm. With my Seoul flight boarding, I ran to the gate agent who at first tried to convince me that the time 2:10pm was really 2100 hours, that is, 9pm. But then she saw the problem, and got on the phone. She suggested alternatives, such as landing me in Jacksonville (which wouldn't actually get me anywhere near home) and finally said they'd rescheduled me to stay overnight in Dallas, and leave the next day. So, in summary, American Airlines took my money two months in advance, then cancelled connecting flights both ways, never notified me, mishandled the problem when issuing me initial boarding passes in Seoul, and has turned my 14 or 15 hour travel times into something more like 40 hours each way. I will never ever fly American Airlines again - although they may go bankrupt and disappear too soon for me to enjoy shunning them.
• CURSES on ResearchGate, another social media hoax that tries to get researchers to join, list their information and publications, presumably so that they can sell ads or services to this collection of academics. I joined at what I thought was the personal invitation of a friend, and soon discovered that anyone I had co-authored a paper with was receiving bogus personal invitations to join from me. Since then, I get a regular blizzard of specious news about this or that person viewing my profile, or having a new publication. Now I have redirected all such messages to my junk mail folder, until such time as I care enough to figure out how to cancel my worthless membership (but see LinkedIn above to make a judgment about whether that will do me any good or not.)
• Minor CURSES on GMAIL, for their idiotic improvements. The change I absolutely despise is the modification to Reply. Aside from all the other unpleasant facts about this change, what I hate the most is that without your realizing, your message includes the previous message. And if you are in GMAIL pingpong with someone, it includes every single message and response since you originally said simply "Wassup?". This useless repetition creates an ever-growing message blob whose actual information content becomes a dwindling fraction of its mass; in some cases, I have actually not even noticed where the new message is. When I think of it, I try to delete the tiny ellipsis at the bottom of the box that, I think, indicates the preceding messages; but why is this so hidden? Why is there no way to set your options so that you never ever append the message you are replying to? Are we all monkeys with no memory that have to see every single bit of the past in order to recall what the hell we were talking about? Does Google need to fill up vast archives of disk space with this twaddle?
• CURSES on the FSU library, which should shorten its name to "-ary' since they got rid of the books! Well, they didn't really get rid of all of them, but they took three floors of books and journals, threw some out, and stuffed the rest into the basement on crankshaft shelves, knowing full well that they have destroyed the use and pleasure of a library in this way. This means they can devote the two inhabited floors to a coffee shop, a computer game room, computer labs, and chatting zones. Now that the library is just a study hall, when do we put all the librarians down in the basement too?