Hardware and Software

Few things put me into fight-or-flight (in this case, always flight) mode faster than tech going wrong. And of course with built-in enshittification (used to be "obsolesence" but enshittification is so much worse) things go wrong a lot more quickly than they used to. For about a week I haven't been able to log onto a client site, and neither the helpdesk at my firm nor theirs has been able to help me. So this will probably necessitate a trip to the physical client site in the Wall Street area in my near future to get someone to fix it there. Then our printer gave out today, shortly after I printed my pay stub. Robin's kept it going for about eight years but couldn't manage whatever was wrong with it today, so we bit the financial bullet and bought a new one, arriving tomorrow. Lastly, what the what with our cable? We haven't been able to tune into a bunch of channels for a few days now. Our workaround was watching them via Apple TV, which means it's not the carrier but the physical cable boxes. I suspect an update caused something to break, and it turned out the boxes needed a hard reboot (which the carrier usually does remotely but didn't this time). Voila, our channels are all back now, albeit with occasionally jumps in the transmission (which I still think of as glitches in the matrix). I miss the days when I could just turn on a TV and adjust the antenna...