Alice may once again blog, periodically

Alice has taken up blogging again, at no regular intervals, because she misse the community of bloggers, before Facebook came along and we gave away the remainder of our souls and that 20-century concept, privacy. It irks me to be so stripped of mine, to have to key in the same numbers over and over before our phone calls have a chance in hell in going through.

I was recently asked to fill out a questionnaire with 2 truths and a lie, not saying which was which. In the end my truthful one came down to, migraines have made my life hell. The lie I remember is, technology is for boys and their toys, and they should either get a hobby or get laid -- anything to keep them away from another "upgrade."

If you didn't complete your task sufficiently, why should I want to try your new latest--and-greatest, when it is evident that you, like most boys, failed to put away your toys and left your underpants on the living room floor, so to speak, for me to clean up what you were incapable of learning.

Did I sign up to be a beta tester on your software? Did I have any input whatsoever, when you were busy making Word a lovely piece of software on which to turn your blue italic prose in an obscure font in a strange type size? Or when you decided it was more important to choose the proper header and drop in a photo or a chart in lieu of making more editing choices available? I thought the program was called "Word" for a reason. I didn't realize the Word was having its sunset years.

And user-friendly? Try user hostile. It is way more apt. Before the mouse came along, I never needed "customer care," which does not imply what "support" would it my mind. "Service" and "support" went the way of all flesh, based on consumer need for cheap appliances, which thus far strikes me as the opposite of "going green."

If everything is going to break down after 2 or 3 years, where is it going to go? Last I heard, plastic electronics, are not the quickest thing to break down in a land fill. And how many fleece items do plastic soda bottles consume?

Then there's the big companies idea of going green -- they are simply too cheap to print the manuals. I bet the cost saving on the tech "support" end of things would be more profitable if someone wrote a manual in plain, layperson's English. That, I doubt, will happen any time soon. Why not have you use paper and ink to get the information that used to come packaged neatly with the computer. Now, we're lucky if we get pictograms. Great for the graphically inclined, for the literary, not so much.....

As for photo editing, here is another task I did not sign up for. With the digital camera, it is difficult to compose a shot, as we did for film. When you were getting charged by the photo, and retained the negative, it was much easier to duplicate and much less trying on the eyes.

I also did not sign up to be a travel agent, much less one who writes companion tickets, or for me going somewhere more complicated than going from point A to point B and back again. Also, she refuses to rely on such sites as Trip Advisor. I don't want to know what the masses thought and decided was worthy of the Web; she would rather stick to her travel agent of 30 years, who knows Alice's preferences cold -- and hot.

So that is part I of Alice's return. She will write again; she hopes to avoid this topic. She has had many more thoughts in the past year, most of them floating through her mind and out again. If she can latch on to them, she will blog more often.