The Tyranny of Technology - Part 1

Mark is ready to give up on technology. Some days he blames Apple and other days he blames Google. They have taken over his life. One or the other of them seems to want him to change his password every other day. And because he's allowed these giant, faceless, impersonal, corporations to take control of managing his passwords, he's been locked out of every account he has. (I keep mine written down in a book, so I don't have this problem.)

It did motivate him to get the company email working again. (We'd lost control of that a couple of years ago when we were hacked.) But he can no longer use his gmail account that he's had for years. Not sure what else he's lost access to. I only know that this man who rarely raises his voice or loses his temper has been slamming things, shouting, and just downright cranky. (You can fix most things with a hug - but the fix is only temporary.)

Part of this disaster is access to his Amazon account. Not all bad, as he won't be spending any money with them, but it's also difficult for me to figure out what he bought and whether it was for us or for the business. (Amazon was so good at keeping track of those things for you. I loved how easy it was to look up previous orders.)

But the bad news is that we bought a security camera, (after that $1700 water bill - we wanted to see who was coming into our back yard while we were away) but he couldn't get it to connect to the internet like it was supposed to. We were going to return it. Returning anything from Amazon requires you to log in to your account to set up the return. He couldn't do that because all of his passwords had been deleted.

So he called Amazon to try to regain access to his account. He was on speaker phone so I heard the whole exchange. He explained the problem. He needed to return an item but he'd lost access to his account. A pompous-sounding young lady (I assume young and I believe her British accent to be affected rather than genuine) told him that she would ask him three questions and that he must answer all three correctly or the conversation would be ended and he would not be granted access to his account.

Two of the questions were reasonable. They were about places he'd lived or cars he'd owned. I don't exactly remember that third question but it amounted to "what color shirt where you wearing on the last Monday when there was a full moon?" And just like that, the conversation was over. He still couldn't access the account, and we couldn't return the camera. No instructions on what to do next. Nothing. I couldn't believe it. We tried to ask what to do next but Daphne or Hillary or whatever Miss Uppity's name only stated that the conversation had ended and hung up.

I explained the problem to the credit card company. They issued a credit, but of course when Amazon responded that the item had been delivered and not returned, they reinstated the charge.

I hope that when we move we'll be able to get that security camera to work. And meanwhile, if that is Amazon's version of helping a customer - we probably don't need to shop there anymore, anyway. In the meantime, I need to figure out how to cancel that Amazon account.