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Friday, December 27, 2013

When Technology Fails

My technology woes began about three weeks ago when my  Windows 7 desktop was infected with adware. Those critters were slipping past the free Microsoft Essential virus protector. I remembered that Best Buy gave me a malware/adware /virus protector named Trend Micro Titanium. The salesman told me that I probably wouldn’t need it because my new MacBook Pro laptop does not need a virus protector. I installed the software on my desktop and it found 137 parasites, two days later it found 424 more, and then I had to go through a continuous loop of booting and rebooting until they were finally gone. I was just on the verge of calling a technician, so they could pull out those critters by the root.

A few days before Christmas, my wife went to Target and paid for a couple of gifts using her debit card. It wasn’t a long after that when she heard on the news that 40 million of Target's credit and debit card customers’ information might have been compromised. Within hours, my wife received an e-mail from Target informing her that she should check our bank account for any discrepancies. It’s funny; we've never had a Target credit card, so how did they get my wife’s e-mail address? My wife had to go through the process of receiving a new debit card but was told that she could keep her pin number. The next day she received a new e-mail from Target advising her to change your pin number, so on to the bank she went to change our pin number because we didn’t want to take the chance. Lucky for us, we got to the bank on time before any one tried to illegally withdraw any funds.

Last night, I saw a news story of a person who ordered lobster from Amazon for her Christmas Eve party. Say what? Anyway UPS was a day late and a dollar short, so all she got the next day was smelly lobster. Amazon refunded her money and gave her a $25.00 gift card but that didn’t make up for a ruined Christmas Eve party. I guess there’s a moral to this story, the customer expected too much and Amazon oversold on what they could deliver.

Delta Air had a costly computer glitch, so it was not only customers who suffered. Some lucky airline customers received a $48.00 round trip from North Carolina to Los Angeles and another received a trip from Los Angeles to Hawaii for $88.00 which normally sells for over $3000. Delta honored all the tickets that were sold online. The fact that they honored the ticket purchases, gave them some unintended goodwill publicity.

Despite all the ups and down, I’m still anxiously awaiting the iPhone 6 or the next electronic gadget that will make my life easier

Hope everyone had a good holiday and didn’t suffer from any technology failures.

6 comments:

Mike said...

There are a couple of websites where you cash in or trade in those gift cards . I heard that close to $2 billion in gift cards were not used last year.

Legion said...

Damn malware, lol. Now that you deleted them, it would be wise to clean your registry. They all leave tracks behind in the registry.

I've used ccleaner, it's ok but kinda slow. Iv'e also used adw malware and registry cleaner, it's a lot faster and finds things ccleaner doesn't.

Both are free. One advantage besides finding more malware with adw, is that you don't have to install it. Once you use it it's not on your computer, you can save the adw file if you want to tho.

I use the adw from cnet but you have to tell them you don't want the 3 or 4 downloads they try to get you to use too. lol

Mike said...

I've been using ccleaner but I forgot about the register.

It was aggravating ,upgrade this,and your PC is running slow and buy this and that....:-)

Mike said...

Weird....Some emails from 2008 showed up in my Gmail account..

This is the time of the year I delete emails and junk from my computer.

I did sync my iPhone to an air printer on first try,so that's a plus.

I fix several of my programs with the Windows compatibility option.

My wife's computer needed several Microsoft updates,drivers, and a complete overhaul..:-)

born2Bme said...

What's with the VA Comment section? New comments are not added for days and I know that people are commenting.

Mike said...

Christmas & New Years skeleton crew maybe