In the computer (r)age [NSFW]

I don't rage often. I'm the kind of guy who, if you spit in my face -- I mean literally spit in my face -- I'll just glare at you and calmly say "you really have a problem, don't you?"

I don't swear often. I believe there are other ways to convey a message, through planned words that leave your conversational partners speechless. My conversational partner isn't here.

I don't complain often. Even though things can always be better, they can also be worse. For that, I am thankful, because I don't want things to be worse.

Today is an exception.

I hate my tech situation, and here's why. Be warned: lots of naughty words and all-caps.

Spoiler

It is the year two-thousand-and-goddamn-sixteen. Nobody in a modernized nation, be it America or Australia or Sweden or Russia or Japan should have to deal with this garbage.

Do you have a data limit on your phone? Yeah, that's fine, mobile technology is difficult, we're still figuring out how to make it work right. Do you have it at home? Probably not, because we've known how to make home internet work nicely for over a decade. Do I have a data limit at home? YES, AND WHY THE FUCK DO I HAVE IT? I DON'T FUCKING KNOW!

It has been three goddamn YEARS since I have been able to play an online game with a friend across the ocean or even across the street. It has been three goddamn YEARS since I have been able to even download an online game without worrying about a data limit. It has been three goddamn YEARS since I have been able to sit back and watch youtube without calculating the size of the incoming video file, or decided "yeah, that was nice, maybe I'll watch it again tomorrow". I can't even go to fucking deviantart or amazon or newgrounds because of some mysterious part of their website that guzzles my available data like Nestle taking over the Colorado River, only instead pretend that the Colorado River was just a trickle all along. (Oh, and add two more years to the future of those three: we just signed a contract. Hooray!)

Last week, I helped Aura complete his Pokédex. Near the end of our trading, he traded a Poliwhirl to me so it could evolve into a Politoed. When I tried to give it back though? Random internet fuckup! I spent 45 minutes trying to trade that thing back, when I wanted to be asleep 15 minutes before we started. And this kind of BS has been going on for years. That previous ISP I had for three years, they had an no-data-limit situation from 2AM to 7AM every morning. At least there's a little bit of access, I used to say sarcastically. I would have to wait until 2AM to start downloading or watch anything, and wake back up at 7AM to make sure it stopped and didn't eat up all my internet for the day, and that was any time I wanted to download a Steam game or other large download. Now I can't even do that at all. If I want to make a large download, I need to drag my entire full-tower computer to someone's house and fucking leave it there overnight. Just to be able to download a game that's over ~100 MB in size. Do you know what kind of games are that size? GBA games, for one. Dark Echo, for another (great game, but do me a favor and look it up on Steam to find why it's so tiny). Even Battle Block theater is two gigabytes. That's 20% of my internet for the month, not including ordinary things like checking email, just for a kit-based 2D game. I can't download security updates for my computer, because they tend to run in the 100MB-500MB range! Oh, by the way, my computer security is out of date. I don't really care, since my internet is so bad I wish you luck in being able to actually take advantage of any malware you want to put there. Want to steal my tax information? Give it a try, why not, it's not like you'll be able to pull a few megabytes off my computer anyhow. Oh, and dare I not have adblocker installed on any browser. If a video ad loads without my knowledge, it will proceed right on to the next, and the next, and the next without me knowing. So yeah, every website (minus LV) who asks me to politely disable adblocker because it helps their revenue? I'm sorry, but I collected some of the "fuck you"s my various ISPs have given me over the years, and you're welcome to have one if you like, but no, I will not disable adblocker, not while my internet is like this.

Who, in a modernized nation, can't do those basic things? Watch youtube? Get security updates? Be plagued by ads?

I have to print eight pages of a report for my classes tomorrow. I just spent FIFTEEN GODDAMN MINUTES standing at a WIRELESS PRINTER with a usb cable stuck between it (the WIRELESS printer) and my laptop because nobody in my house can realize that it's a pretty awful idea to put a router in the corner of an otherwise unused basement. Wireless technology underground? WONDERFUL IDEA! Far from half of the wireless technology in the house? WONDERFULER IDEA! You have to walk into the garage, put on shoes, walk down the stairs, across the entire house again, into the laundy room and in a worthless little nook you can hardly stand in every time you have to reset the router, which is every day because of this BULLSHIT technology? WONDERFUCKINGFULTASTIC IDEA! Oh, and I still don't have my papers printed. It's year 2016 and I can't even print black-and-white documents over a wired connection.

I can't even access LV without a proxy. That's right: I need a goddamn proxy in a specialized browser just to talk about pokeymanz.

I can't even use Skype. Do you know what happens if I do? Everyone else is plagued by a notification that I'm suddenly back online and back offline every few seconds. You better turn off your settings that notifies you that anyone is available or unavailable, because it will be unrelenting.

Do you know what normal (aka sensible) people do? They put their router (and modem) in a populated part of the house such that the devices that use it (which, get this, are used in populated parts of houses) can effectively use them! Plug a game console directly into a router? Good idea, but at least my N64 doesn't need to go online. Plug a computer into a router? Also a good idea. Have the router be above ground so that a tablet or handheld videogame can actually access it? Also a pretty good idea. Good idea count in my house: zero.

I work tech support for a certain unspecified game developer. Most of what I handle, and by most I mean like 19/20 of all problems brought to me, are regarding this developer's current very popular MMO, available on all current home gaming platforms minus the WiiU. One of the perks of this job is that I'm entitled to a copy of that game for free for testing purposes. That's nice, because when people say "My game is refusing to progress during this mission/quest/task/whatever" I should be able to give a five-second answer like "your game isn't broken, so you don't need to verify its integrity or reinstall, just talk to this character and you're good to go." I should be able to do that, it would help me be better at my job. One of my recent callers, we determined his game was corrupted so he had to reinstall from the Xbox store. "But... that will take hours to complete. You mean I can't play again until tomorrow?" "BITCH, IT WOULD TAKE ME SEVERAL GODDAMN MONTHS TO DOWNLOAD THE GAME, QUIT YOUR COMPLAINING!"

Did you know that South Korea and Japan both have laws requiring that all non-mobile internet be entirely free of data limits? I think that's reasonable. After all, internet access is almost as necessary as driving is these days, and roads are publicly paid for by tax payers. You know what else is paid for by taxpayers? Free internet covering 95% of the land area of Estonia. That's right, you can go to FUCKING ESTONIA, plant your butt on someone's roof, or under a bridge, or in the local homeless camp and get high-speed internet for free. IN FUCKING ESTONIA!

Back to the printer. "But Zero," I'm sure you're asking, "Why don't you just print that report at the institution in which it's to be utilized?" Excellent question, respected reader. You carry a valid point. After all, pretty much every school and every workplace in every modernized nation on this planet has printers, even if they're simple printers from the 90s. But mine? I get charged fifty cents per printed page at school. Not a big deal, I'm already paying several thousand dollars to attend school here, but do you realize that I'm PAYING TO PRINT HOMEWORK! It's bad enough that I'm being charged $70 to be able to access online homework against my will when I don't even want to pay that much for Fallout 4, but another four dollars just to print this assignment? That's more than I would want to spend on lunch, and at least lunch makes me feel good after I use it. I have to go to a terminal, log in on that terminal, access my standard issue email address, choose a payment option, type in my credit card like I'm opening a new Amazon account, be issued a temporary password to retrieve my print, walk to another floor of the library, track down the kiosk, operate a touch-screen computer straight out of 2002, try to retrieve my paper, only to be told I can't because my credit card expired because of the new "chip technology" DESPITE THE FACT THAT IT DOESN'T EXPIRE UNTIL NOVEMBER OF NEXT YEAR! SEE! EXPIRES 11 17! IT'S STILL VALID, AND I DON'T WANT YOUR CHIP TECHNOLOGY ANYHOW! LET ME JUST PAY FOR MY HOMEWORK TO BE IN MY HANDS!

Do you know how much printer paper costs? I just looked at Staples' website and I can buy 5000 sheets for 25 dollars (but that's consumer quantities, not a university's bulk price, which is undoubtedly even better). Let's simplify the math there: 5000 sheets for 2500 cents. That's half a cent per page. They're charging me fifty cents. They are ramping up the price times 100. Why? Is it for the convenience (asterisk) of me being able to print (asterisk) from anywhere (asterisk) on campus (asterisk)? Because those printers cost money that my tuition totally doesn't pay? Because the ink they disperse is actually the hallowed blood of beasts who once roamed these lands in the primordial darkness before gods? No, no, and no. It's BECAUSE THEY FUCKING CAN, THAT'S WHY!

Speaking of institutions doing what they feel like because fuck the paying customers, I was looking at my new ISP's website for details surrounding our plan. Let give you the powdered milk-concentrate version: we get 10 GB per month for the entire household to share (which is less than many people's non-shared mobile plans). If we run out of that, they throttle our speed down to less than 1 MB/s until next month when the data is replenished. Here's another tidbit I found in their legal section: "customers who regularly use excessive amounts of data beyond their data limit will have their speeds reduced farther." Excessive amounts of data? That's just their way of saying "fuck you, customer, we do what we want". There are also other policies that are more twisted than Cthulhu's mustache, like pay-per view on our TV using our data, which equates to watch one show, lose 10% of your entire month of data, but I'll leave most of the rest to your imagination. It's better that way, lest you be driven mad by the revelation, like I am.

Why doesn't anyone consult me, a young adult who has been around computers and internet since age ten and has been a bona-fide expert in them for at least five years, before making internet-related decisions? You know what happens when you don't consult me? You get home internet with sub-par speed and stability, handicapped further by your own shoddy implementation, and waste money on a Smart TV (don't trust anything that markets itself with the word "Smart" EVER) that you can't even use because of the above issues!

So yeah. Fuck telecom companies, fuck greedy universities, fuck uninformed internet decisions.

I'm getting a fucking snack. Peace out.

 

I don't know if that's sarcasm or not, but I'm not trying to be a hero. If I was trying to be a hero, I'd be printing this out (oh, wait) and nailing it to the doors of my ISP's shareholders. If I was trying to be an anti-hero, you'd be hearing about me on the news.

Heroes do things. Rally people, if nothing else. Do you see me waving a flag and saying "follow me, we're going to march on <insert place here>!" No, I'm sitting on my butt because I can't actually do anything here. A two-year contract was signed even though I could smell the bad news the second I heard "contr---", and I know any of these mentioned groups has more power than I do, and nothing I say or do means anything. I decide to get a different ISP? There's a contract and fee. I want to go to a different school? I'm going to lose credits and still be paying thousands per year at a different college.

I'm just venting here.

 

And I have been letting it fester, this is just a way of getting it out. Most of it is the fact that 80% of this could be avoided if the decisions were left to me. I could find a less-bad ISP, I could help them not set it up stupidly, I could configure a printer to not suck, I could make all of these things less terrible if only only the powers that be (in this case the lord and lady of the house) would simply delegate power to those more knowledgeable in this particular field.

If we, as a family unit, are going to start raising hens for eggs, we should seek my mom for guidance. If we are going to re-tile a bathroom or carpet a bedroom, we should get help from my dad. If we are going to replace our internet service and invest hundreds of dollars into new pieces of tech to make use of it, we should let me help and make sure any of it will work and make sure it keeps working. And that's the disconnect: although I am widely acknowledged to be technically proficient (as well as culturally aware and intellectually active), nobody lets me help. I say things like "hey mom, do you want Netflix? I could help you get it. Hey dad, do you want to be able to use your work computer from home? I could help you do that. Hey brother, do you want to be able to play computer games together even after I move out? I could make it happen. Hey me, do you want to be able to print a sheet of paper without literally unplugging the entire printer, moving it to another room with better wifi, printing it out, then replacing it where it came from? I could totally do that."

We each have our expertise. Mine is with computers, sciences, and world culture as it ties in with other fields. My whole family acknowledges it, yet none let me act on it. It won't change any time soon, and I know it, because if it could change, it would have already. And if it did change already, the only above of these problems still existing in the household would be the school printing, which would be avoided by having home printing work, which is one of the things I could have fixed. On that note, that 80% of problems being avoidable? It's actually 100% of the problems solvable.

So really, for all it's worth and all it's accomplishing, this is what I'm doing, but it feels good: