Peg Kerr's Journal

I have an exceedingly helpful little tool that I pull out every day: a USB lighter. I like to light candles every night in my living room, and instead of going through scores of matches, I slide a plastic tab on the side of the lighter, making two metal prongs stick out of the end. A push of a button causes a small arc of electricity to light up between the two prongs, which easily lights a candle wick. It can be used about 300 times to light something until you simply re-charge it with a USB port.

But this week, inexplicably, the plastic slide tab over the ignition switch became stuck in the closed position, and no matter what I did to try to pry it open, it remained stuck. This exceedingly useful piece of technology, something that made my life easier every day, was suddenly useless.

This week was like that.

You may have seen news stories about the LastPass breach. LastPass is a password manager, a website that supposedly was protected and encrypted. I've used it for about the past eight years to store all my passwords--you only have to remember one password, rather than several hundred.

And now it's been compromised, doubtless by criminals eager to sell the information on the dark web. The advice I read from security experts was to stop using it, find a new password service, and immediately change your most important passwords.

So after some research, I set up an account with a new password service, exported my LastPass passwords to it, and began the task. And I immediately ran into trouble.

So far I have changed four passwords. And it’s taken six hours so far of trouble-shooting. Changing my bank password immediately locked me out of the account. Tried calling and was on hold for forty minutes until I gave up and hung up. Had to resort to a chatbot to get it fixed.

Then I attempted to change three different email account passwords. I got entirely locked out of my main email account for several days, the one the bills come to. My email provider kept sending the password reset email, but mysteriously it would never arrive in the backup email inbox, even though it was registered to the account. And I still couldn’t download email on the other two accounts on my laptop. Mysteriously, even though I repeatedly walked through the steps to configure the email, my mail app on my laptop absolutely refused to connect. Apple said it was Comcast’s fault and Comcast said it was something wrong with the Apple mail app.

I’m just absolutely gobsmacked that something that should be as simple as a password reset resulted in five hours of troubleshooting with five separate customer service reps. I started to wonder whether I would ever get access to my main email account again. After having it for close to twenty years. It was maddening--the last tech seemed especially clueless, apparently unable to ascertain from his computer that I even HAD an account, when I've been a customer for decades. Unbelievable.

I eventually got so desperate that I drove to an XFinity store to talk to someone in person, because the techs over the phone or via chat seemed so buffoonishly ineffectual. Fortunately, the person I found there seemed to have a better idea of what he was doing, and I finally got back into my email account and got everything to download today.

That’s six hours of trouble-shooting on just four accounts. And I have several hundred more passwords to change.

So it's been a really stressful week. I ended up taking a sick day on Thursday--extra stress led to poor sleep, which led to a migraine headache.

I will say, despite all the heartburn and yes, all the lost sleep from worry, I've also experienced some remarkable instances of kindness this week. A neighbor shoveled my walk after the latest storm (particularly welcome after my fall last week), and several other people reached out spontaneously to offer me some very welcome and generous technological assistance. And another friend took me out for a really spectacular dinner. I'm grateful for the support during what has been a difficult couple of weeks.

(I still intend to keep titles for these individual collages to one word this year. This week I sort of cheated by using a compound word. After the week I've had, I'm crabby enough to say that if you don't like it, bite me.)

Top center: LastPass padlock, unlocked. Center, semi-transparent: the words "Deep Web" surrounded by bytes 0s and 1s. Center right: a USB lighter wand. Left: Peg on the phone, with a frustrated expression on her face. Lower left: a hand reaches to a woman, lower right, who has her hands over her face, apparently in despair.

Techno-Frustration



Click here to see the 2023 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2022 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2021 52 Card Project gallery.

So...my personal computer melted down into slag yesterday. Literally—the techs at Best Buy put it into a bucket of sand to eliminate the possibility of fire. The hard drive cannot be salvaged—once the battery starts blowing up like a balloon (the laptop case was actually bulging), the hard drive and motherboard are toast. My new computer arrives in two weeks.

I have everything on backup—except email, because of the peculiar way Rob set it up years ago. I hereby declare email bankruptcy and will be starting from scratch when the nice person from Geek Squad comes to set it up. I am working on fostering an attitude of fatalistic peace about this. Not quite there yet.

Rob’s ex-manager at Best Buy was incredibly kind. They loved Rob and always take really good care of me when I come into the store. We shared a few memories, and the manager mentioned how much he missed Rob—he actually had tears in his eyes.

I had tears in my eyes, too, when I reflected that had Rob been alive, this probably wouldn’t have happened. He was always current on computer tech specs and buddies with his coworkers on Geek Squad (he tried to move to one of those positions before he got sick, so he was always studying current computer news/training). He would have taken note of the battery recall (this is a known issue with MacBooks) and would have hectored me to go in and get the battery swap done in response to the recall.

I ordered the exact same computer. The manager pointed out a lower-priced model, but no. Rob carefully researched and picked out this model especially for me.

Damn. I hadn’t planned to drop so much money this week.

Okay, all you on my friends list who've been crowing for years about how wonderful your Apples are, and gloating about how they are sooooooo reliable, and you neveh have to worry when you Go Mac, well, you can all go suck eggs now, all right? I'm just saying. It's nothing personal, you understand. It's just that moony's right: the hard drives for the iMac G5 are back-ordered. So I'm going on a second week now without my six-month old very expensive Apple computer.

Rob is working on getting the store manager to agree to allow the techs to put a temporary hard drive into the machine so we can take it home and work on that way until the proper drive comes in. Because maybe they don't want their top Apple salesman in the store having to admit that his wife is going around saying, after six months experience with their top-of-the-line computer, that Apple sucks eggs, now do they?

Now the laptop is not working. The laptop with all the tax return information that Rob swore he would finally get finalized yesterday. The mouse touchpad isn't working; he wonders if it has a virus. He hasn't been able to get it working again yet.

I swear to God I am ready to spontaneously combust out of sheer overwhelming frustration.

We have suddenly had problems develop with the new computer. Rob has taken it in to the store to have the techs look at it. It keeps inexplicably shutting itself off. Keep your fingers crossed for us. Not sure if I'll be able to be online much this weekend; it depends on what the techs discover is causing the difficulty. There's the laptop, except that Rob is supposed to be using that to (finally, please God) finish the fricking taxes.

Damn it. That's a brand new (and very expensive) computer.

still no e-mail. Rob's still trying to reconstruct our e-mail account, but he's hampered by the fact that the disk he made for backup inexplicably got marked "read only" so he can't copy the needed files. He's going to take it into the store today and see if the tech monkeys can do anything with it.

Gotta dash to work. Later.

P.