I woke up at 2:49am this morning to a very different alarm. My cellphone was blaring a confused blending of 284 sms’ from the bank telling me Im logging onto my internet banking. Considering I got paid yesterday, this naturally freaked me out and I called the number on one of the notification sms’.
The bank’s app is misbehaving, my meagre cash is safe but they need to disable the internet banking app and I need to present myself at a branch to reactivate it. Relief AND annoyance…
What glitches have you experienced which freaks you out?
A month or two ago I finally got a smartphone as birthday gift. Actually a neat toy. But boy, did I have my work cut out for me to work out how to switch off its autocorrect function, which insisted on correcting all messages typed in Afrikaans. I just hate it when machines presume to think on my behalf. -)
Lack of testing is my biggest complaint against manufacturers of both software and hardware. It’s hard to buy anything these days without finding out in short order that it’s flaky in some way or another. TV box that hangs at random intervals–usually at the most suspenseful scene of a movie we’re trying to watch; banking app that can’t find a connection when all other apps connect fine; stockbroker’s new website that can’t find my banking details, although they show up fine in the old website; kettle that can’t be poured from without dribbling all over the kitchen counter (FFS, didn’t they even make a prototype to test before they went into production?); cellphone that plays audio ads at 0300 in the morning–I could go on and on, but it would be boring…
Those automated telemarketers are among the more maddening aspects of modern life. Who woulda thunk there’d be something worse than traditional telemarketers? And I don’t know if I should just block their numbers, because perhaps this will inform them that my number is active, after which they’ll sell it to millions of other telemarketers…
If you’re getting robo calls, or a lot of telemarketing or probe calls (phone rings and if you answer it hangs up… they’re just checking your number works) you needTrueCaller in your life. It identifies phone calls and will tell you 99/100 times if it’s spam or not. I choose to share very little with it (it will try to use your phone book to resolve people’s names, for instance). But all-in-all it has made my life a zero tolerance zone for phone marketing, and I always know who’se calling before I answer. Some company keeps calling? You can block them too. Works for texts too, it can automatically block known spam numbers… but I don’t use it for that because I’ve worked in the sms space and the concept of a “number” is a pretty flexible one in that space. A number that is legit today can be spam tomorrow and versa vice.
If it’s android based, Multiling Okeyboard supports afrikaans autocomplete and swipe gestures. Very configurable, a bit of getting used to how to install and switch languages, etc. But I love it.