Minor things that bother you

[thenetwork]

Early, early on, cable was billed as ad-free TV. By the time I remember watching it -- 1985-86, there were commercials for sure.

When Cartoon Network expanded with the Boomerang Channel, it was originally commercial free, albeit with short Boomerang IDs or skits in lieu of where commercial breaks would air.  Those were the days!

Mouses

That doesn't sound right.

mice

That doesn't sound right, either.

meese

Vermin

Mousi

Le Mousse.

[D-Dey65]

Mouses are pretty cheap.

True. It's often harder to find one that isn't a remote mouse though.

[elsmere241]

Mouses are pretty cheap.

True. It's often harder to find one that isn't a remote mouse though.

I got a new laptop recently that didn't come with a mouse.  Because I have two other laptops (one is for work) I asked my wife (who works at Staples) to get me a wired mouse.  No one at Staples could understand why.

[kphoger]

Vermin

I need to remember that one. 

[JayhawkCO]

Mouses are pretty cheap.

True. It's often harder to find one that isn't a remote mouse though.

I got a new laptop recently that didn't come with a mouse.  Because I have two other laptops (one is for work) I asked my wife (who works at Staples) to get me a wired mouse.  No one at Staples could understand why.

Did I miss in this thread why you prefer a wired one?

[kphoger]

Did I miss in this thread why you prefer a wired one?

I do too.  The battery never goes dead, and there's never a lost connection.

[JayhawkCO]

Did I miss in this thread why you prefer a wired one?

I do too.  The battery never goes dead, and there's never a lost connection.

I, sadly, have enough wires around my mouse area, so I'm glad I have a wireless (vertical) mouse, which I've never lost connection to other than a battery issue. I have a USB hub with various chargers (headphones, watch, a wireless pad for my phone, etc.), so one less wire is welcome.

[kkt]

Did I miss in this thread why you prefer a wired one?

I do too.  The battery never goes dead, and there's never a lost connection.

The battery always seems to go dead at the least convenient time - want to print out my tickets to a show and need to get out the door to get to our dinner reservations? 

[1995hoo]

Mouses are pretty cheap.

True. It's often harder to find one that isn't a remote mouse though.

Finding a wired one that's suitable for left-handed use is even more difficult. (I'm not left-handed, but I use my left hand to control the mouse.) I have a wireless mouse for my personal PC but am required to use a wired mouse for work and I didn't like the one they provided me (too small for my hand and the buttons sometimes seemed unresponsive). Only downside of getting my own is that while it works without installing a driver, if I want to be able to program the buttons, I have to install the software that came with it and that means having IT remote in to do it, which isn't worth the trouble.

[elsmere241]

Did I miss in this thread why you prefer a wired one?

I do too.  The battery never goes dead, and there's never a lost connection.

And with as many as three laptops on my desk, I don't want to deal with crossed connections.

[GaryV]

And with as many as three laptops on my desk, I don't want to deal with crossed connections.

My wife seldom uses her mouse, so often it gets left in the office. I took my computer in there and started moving her mouse around on the desk and wondered why it didn't work.

[CNGL-Leudimin]

Mouses

That doesn't sound right.

mice

That doesn't sound right, either.

meese

Vermin

Mousi

This made me remember that Plurals thread we had a few years ago, including using Latin/Greek declensions ad absurdum (e.g. an explosion, a full battle of "explosia", and an entire war worth of "explosiae").

[D-Dey65]

I just realized that it's probably not the mouse. It's the stupid Microsoft update. They screwed me up the same way a few months ago. I'm going to see if I can set this PC back to an earlier date.

UPDATE; MARCH 1, 2024; Okay, now things are even worse. I can't make blended photos anymore. If I try to add one to the right side of the other, it posts the second photo on top of the first one and doesn't let me move it off to the side.  On top of that, when I clicked the bold type button on this post, it gave me two sets of markups, not one.

[kphoger]

1.  When you click on a taskbar icon to open the program, then it doesn't do anything for a while, so you click to open it again, and then a minute later two windows of the same program pop open.

2.  When you double-click a desktop icon to open the program, but for some reason it doesn't open.  I've started triple-clicking just to avoid this.

[kurumi]

1.  When you click on a taskbar icon to open the program, then it doesn't do anything for a while, so you click to open it again, and then a minute later two windows of the same program pop open.

Related: you launch a program that's slow to open, but you know this, so you go work on something else. As soon as the slowpoke app is ready, it interrupts you, opens a top-level window, and grabs your keyboard focus.

[1995hoo]

...

2.  When you double-click a desktop icon to open the program, but for some reason it doesn't open.  I've started triple-clicking just to avoid this.

I find double-clicking annoying and inconsistent enough that I often right-click and then use the pop-up menu, or I click once and hit "Enter" on the keyboard. For the most part I tend not to open programs like Word or Excel directly anyway—I open a document that then causes the appropriate program to open. Related to that, it means that sometimes it's important to use the right-click menu if I want to revise a document template (.dotx file) or other file for which the default option is to create a new document based on it, rather than editing the file itself.

[J N Winkler]

There are a few websites I use regularly that suppress all signals a page is loading when you click on a link.  One of them even requires a double, rather than a single, click to follow a link.  These often reduce me to using net logging (F12 in both Firefox and Chrome) just to verify that the click event has been sent to the server.

[kphoger]

There's this ticket system I use at work.  First I have to choose the company name from a dropdown, then I have to choose the region from another dropdown, then the ticket type from another dropdown, and so on.  Those first two have to be done in order.  But the company name dropdown is in a field halfway down the rightmost column, and the region dropdown is at the bottom of the center column.  This bothers me.  They should up at the top-left.

[D-Dey65]

I just tried to revert the problems with the system restore function. My browsers are still crashing, and now my iTunes app doesn't work.

[thenetwork]

1.  When you click on a taskbar icon to open the program, then it doesn't do anything for a while, so you click to open it again, and then a minute later two windows of the same program pop open.

2.  When you double-click a desktop icon to open the program, but for some reason it doesn't open.  I've started triple-clicking just to avoid this.

I once worked for a company where when I tried to click on a certain application, the computer would crash or freeze at least once or twice a week, where I would have to contact one of the owners to fix the issue.

Then these owners (who I later found out used shady tactics for a lot of their operations) later had the GALL to scold me and telling me that" double-clicking" the app when starting it, and any icons within the app would cause the computer to crash, and then I MUST ONLY SINGLE-CLICK ICONS IN THE COMPUTER.

Then when I would start single-clicking everything, the computer would still freeze/crash on a regular basis.  Not long after that I was fired (still collected unemployment as the state agreed that they had no basis on firing me -- more like they tried to get me to quit, but I trudged on despite the toxic environment).

I'd be willing to bet that they were using pirated copies of El Cheapo software, as they were such shiesters!

[ZLoth]

The alienation of the customer continues at HP. From SOURCE:

HP is in the rent-a-printer business now
You already barely own your printer, anyway, but is renting it better?

HP has a new proposition in a time when (companies like it have made sure) you don't really control much about your computer anyway: why don't you just let HP rent you one? The company debuted a subscription service today — just like CEO Enrique Lores said it would last month — called the HP All-In Plan. It's essentially an extension of HP's Instant Ink, and like that plan, you'll have ink sent to you as you approach empty, but unlike it, your monthly fee also covers the printer itself.

Which printer you get depends on the plan you choose. They start at $6.99 per month for 20 pages' worth of prints and whatever the current HP Envy model is, and go all the way up to a $35.99-a-month affair that gets you an OfficeJet Pro and 700 pages. If you go over your page allotment, HP will add more for a dollar per block of 10–15 pages.

FULL ARTICLE HERE

[Scott5114]

When you're texting or DMing someone and ask them a question that you need the answer to in order to do something else, and then that point happens to be when they stop responding because they're doing something else.

And then when they get back it's long enough that the conversation starts with the pleasantries ("good morning", etc) and they don't acknowledge the question the previous conversation left off on, so you have to awkwardly ask it again.

[JayhawkCO]

When you're texting or DMing someone and ask them a question that you need the answer to in order to do something else, and then that point happens to be when they stop responding because they're doing something else.

And then when they get back it's long enough that the conversation starts with the pleasantries ("good morning", etc) and they don't acknowledge the question the previous conversation left off on, so you have to awkwardly ask it again.

Are you shadowing my screen at work? This sounds like my life.

Until entering this industry, I had no idea how bad tech people were at getting back to you. In the restaurant world, you at least got a "Heard". I get radio silence for months sometimes despite bi-weekly follow ups.

[TheHighwayMan3561]

Autofill unloading after one extra keystroke as you go to hit ENTER, so you end up searching for "butt" instead of "butterscotch sundaes" when there was no reason for it to remove the autofill.

Fast food restaurants wanting a name for your order. I don't think it improves quality of service from a customer perspective and it's one more question that cashiers have to ask you to repeat because they didn't hear it correctly.

[kkt]

Autofill unloading after one extra keystroke as you go to hit ENTER, so you end up searching for "butt" instead of "butterscotch sundaes" when there was no reason for it to remove the autofill.

Fast food restaurants wanting a name for your order. I don't think it improves quality of service from a customer perspective and it's one more question that cashiers have to ask you to repeat because they didn't hear it correctly.

But if they give out numbers, some customers will forget their number by the time their food is ready.