Apple Peel

Techno Rage: Coming Soon to a Macintosh Near You

There are days when the frustration caused by the fact that you are a Mac user in a Windows-dominated world can reach a level that is, well, probably unhealthy, and strangely reminiscent of those typical ailments that can affect, on occasion, normally sensible citizens — such as road rage and, more recently, what has been referred to, by analogy, as “air rage”.

It goes something like this.

You know very well that the vast majority of computer users, technical support people, computer store clerks, etc. are, at best, Mac-illiterate and, at worst, positively scornful of you and your “thinking different” machine. You know it and, on a normal day, you are able to live with the fact that you are part of a small minority that remains defiantly different. (You don’t say it too loudly, but you are also rather proud of being part of this minority.)

You also know that technology businesses, such as internet service providers (ISPs), Web hosting services, etc., have to make ends meet, like any other businesses, and, in that respect, their highest priorities definitely do not include supporting a small minority of potential, but annoying, customers that happen to insist on using computers that run a different, more user-friendly operating system (OS) and sometimes use different peripherals based on technologies that are still too “avant-garde” (such as USB a few years ago, and now AirPort/802.1b wireless).

In spite of this, you just know enough about the technology on which your Mac system is based to know that it will work just fine with the products or services that these businesses offer, provided that you don’t rely on them for technical support, you just pay your bills every month, and you get help from fellow Mac users whenever you are experiencing difficulties.

This goes on for years and, in spite of all the effort that Microsoft puts into squashing its competition either openly or in more insidious ways, you have more or less managed to survive in this unfriendly environment.

But then you have a really bad day, such as the one I just had a few days ago.

A Beautiful Day from Computer Hell

It all began rather innocuously. It was a nice, cool, late fall morning. It had snowed a bit on the day before, but now the sky was a radiant blue, there was little wind, and the low rays of the early sun were making the snow-covered nature around our house almost blindingly beautiful. I sat at my desk and started working on my current project.

Then, at around 10:00 am, there were a series of flickers in rapid succession and the power went out. This can happen on occasion in a remote location such as ours, and it is one of the reasons I hit cmd-S to save my documents about as frequently as my eyes blink. The power came back on a minute or so later and I thought that this was the end of the problem. I turned the computer back on and tried to put some order into my many papers during the lengthy starting-up sequence. Even before the sequence was complete, the power went out again. And back on. And out again. At that point, I decided it was better to just leave it alone for a while and maybe go put some wood in the stove or give a few crunchies to our ever-hungry cats. (I keep telling them that there is only so much fat they need around their bellies to protect them from the winter cold, but they keep asking for more. Who am I to disagree with nature’s urges?)

A few minutes later, I received a call from a colleague on her cell phone, who informed me that the power outage seemed to be affecting the whole region. Out of curiosity, I called the automated power-outage reporting system of our local power company. It mentioned a major power outage of “unknown causes” and an estimated recovery time of about five hours. After a few power-independent activities (there aren’t many of those left in our lives!), I was just about to sit down and read these two documents I was supposed to read for a forthcoming meeting when the power came back on. I waited a bit more, but this time it seemed to be back for good.

I turned my computer system back on, and resumed my regular work. In spite of the somewhat “nasty” and unusual nature of the power outage, which had caused a lot of rapid flickering, no device seemed to have been affected. I couldn’t help but notice, however, that my mail servers and the web sites I am trying to visit were extremely unresponsive. Here again, this is nothing abnormal in my situation, and I am used to local domain name servers and the like being down for half an hour or so from time to time. I also figured that the power outage might have caused some disruption with my ISP and that it might take them a little while to fully recover. Besides, I had lots to work on and my email reading and web surfing could wait a bit.

Trying My Luck

The problems didn’t go away, however. After a couple of hours, I started getting impatient. Knowing that my ISP’s average technical support person is usually pretty much clueless, I figured I would do the reasonable thing and restart my entire system in order to eliminate any potential “weirdness”. (This has helped on a few occasions before.) It didn’t help one bit. I would go back online, it would work for a few minutes, and then stall again, with mail servers and web sites that would stop responding altogether.

At that point, I grabbed the phone, even though I knew that it would take a fair amount of luck to end up with a technical support person who might actually be of any help. Sure enough, the first technical support person was quite friendly. She didn’t bother to ask me what kind of system I was using, no. That’s probably asking too much. She started telling to go to the “Start” menu etc. etc. I had to interrupt her to tell her that I had a Mac and that, besides, I knew all my settings were fine and the problem was obviously not in my own set-up.

I didn’t dare mention that my set-up actually involved Mac OS X and an AirPort Base Station connected to a local Ethernet LAN enabling me to share my 28.8 kbps modem connection with three computers. (I know, 28.8 divided by three is pretty pathetic in terms of bandwidth, but what can I do? DSL or cable modems are just not an option here, and one-way access via satellite is still in its infancy around here, and might remain stuck there forever for all I know. Besides, at this point it requires a PC running Windows.)

I figured that having to deal with a Mac user was already a big enough ordeal for this technical support person — and indeed it was. As I was trying to share my Mac expertise with her, however, things started working again. My mail servers were responding again, and web sites were accessible. I figured that there was no point in insisting that the problem be looked into at this point, especially if it was no longer affecting me. So I told her this, thanked her and hung up.

Not So Fast

Of course, I shouldn’t have done that. The problem had not disappeared. It came back a few minutes later. So I went back on the phone and got to talk to another person (again, desperately hoping for the statistically extremely remote possibility that I might end up with a somewhat Mac-friendly person). I explained everything again, and mentioned that I was a tech support person myself and was reasonably certain that the problem was with their network and not with my machine — even though I was using Mac OS X and a beta version of Eudora for Mac OS X rather than the classic Mac OS with the Netscape Communicator software that they wanted us to use with their service.

Amazingly enough, she took my word on it, and went to talk to someone about it. However, things didn’t go as smoothly with the other person, obviously, since she was back a few minutes later with the all-too-familiar refrain: “I’m sorry, but we don’t support Mac OS ten-point-zero.” I didn’t dare correct her and tell her that it was actually Mac OS X version 10.1.1. At that stage, somehow, I just didn’t see the point. Again, I insisted that I was pretty sure it had nothing to do with my own set-up and my own settings, but I still tried to zap the PRAM and reset the AirPort Base Station, just in case, while she was gone talking to the other person again. After completing these two additional trouble-shooting steps, I could honestly say that I had exhausted all possible avenues locally and that it was 100% certain that the problem was elsewhere.

She came back, and, unfortunately, the answer was the same. Just out of curiosity, I asked her just exactly what version of the Mac OS and the Netscape Communicator software they did support. I was quite prepared to be told that their support stopped at Mac OS 9 and the last usable version of Netscape Communicator (which is probably around 4.7.something). Heck, I was even willing to restart in OS 9 and use Netscape Communicator to demonstrate to her that the problem had nothing to do with Mac OS X (or Eudora or Explorer, for that matter).

That’s when she told me the scary news: their support actually stopped at… Mac OS 8.6! Based on this “Mac OS 8.6 - What’s New” Knowledge Base document on Apple’s web site, the Mac OS 8.6 release dates back to… April 1999. (I actually thought it was older than that. Also, I didn’t bother to ask about which version of Netscape Communicator they supported.)

In other words, it appears that my ISP’s support for Mac users officially stops at a system version that is two and a half years old. I must admit that I was floored — and actually furious. I started asking the technical support person whether she realized what this actually meant for prospective Mac users who wanted to subscribe to their service, whether she realized that this was equivalent to something like not supporting Windows Me or Windows XP on the PC side, that, by recommending their service to several fellow Mac users myself, I had actually brought them additional business, etc. — but then I myself realized that there was absolutely no point in telling her about any of this and, since this supervisor of hers was obviously not interested in talking to me directly himself (and even he himself would probably have referred me to a “customer service” person somewhere else in the maze of their phone system), I just gave up, apologized for having raised my voice, and hung up.

Techno Discouraged

When I think about it, however, “techno rage” is probably not the best phrase to describe what I experienced. I was only actually “furious” for a few seconds. The most prevalent feeling I experienced on that particular afternoon was a feeling of deep discouragement. Not only was there no point in telling a technical support person about these issues. Not only was there no point in trying to talk to her supervisor about it. But there probably was no point in talking to a customer service representative about it either — because, obviously, Mac users are, in all likelihood, a small minority of their customer base that is only barely “tolerated”. I doubt very much that my ISP is making any effort to improve its Mac support or would even consider making such an effort. They will not flatly refuse to serve Mac users. (They are obviously still selling a Mac package on a CD-ROM with an old version of Netscape Communicator and instructions for Mac OS 8.6.) But their support is so abysmal that it obviously means that their potential Mac customers must either have enough tech savvy to be able to figure things out themselves and actually “lie” to the ISP about what software they are using to access the service — or that potential Mac customers need to rely on their own form of Mac tech support, usually at their own additional expense (unless they are lucky to have a friend who will do it for free).

And this, it should be noted, is, I believe, the most popular ISP in our Canadian province, and a major player nation-wide. It is Sympatico, a fully-owned subsidiary of our national phone company Bell Canada. It is not a small company with limited resources. (In my experience, smaller companies actually tend to be slightly more Mac-friendly — but they also tend to go out of business after a few months or be bought by a bigger, less user-friendly company, unfortunately.)

What is most discouraging about all this is that I can perfectly understand why, in spite of Apple’s best efforts in promoting and advertising and offering customer support (and their efforts in these areas are not always the best, unfortunately), when it comes to making a computer purchase decision, people tend to simply avoid buying Macintosh products (if they are even aware that the alternative exists). Understandably, people go with the majority, i.e. the standard PC products that their friends and colleagues use and that third-party businesses such as ISPs fully “support”. (We all know what this “full support” actually means in real life, but that is not the point here.)

There is just nothing that any Mac user or advocate can do about these overwhelming economic/social forces that are at play and that contribute to reinforcing the monopoly situation that we are currently experiencing.

A Useful Break

So, how was my problem eventually fixed? At this point, late in the afternoon, I had to go out anyway, so I just gave up and left my computer as it was. When I came back an hour later, my mail servers were working, web sites were loading fine. The problem had simply “disappeared”. Of course, the fact that the problem had disappeared this way was actually a confirmation — if needed — that it had nothing to do with my own set-up (which didn’t change at all during all that time), and that it was something in my ISP’s network that was eventually fixed by someone or something somewhere at some point in the afternoon. Maybe it was because other, PC-using customers complained as well. Maybe it was because my ISP had its own automatic procedures for identifying problems and fixing them. I will never know. But what is for sure is that there was no way for me, at any point, as a Mac user, to get the message through to whoever was in charge that there was actually a problem that needed to be fixed. When there is a problem, I, as a Mac user, am just supposed to tough it out until someone else, who is not a Mac user, bothers to notice the problem and do something about it. I am basically a powerless user of a system that is not intended to be used by people like me. And that’s profoundly discouraging.

Of course, this is probably also a lesson for me. There is absolutely no point in my getting frustrated about this. There is nothing I can do. So the next time something like this happens, I need to avoid worrying about it, attempting to do anything about it. I just need to “live with it”. The trouble is that, as unlikely as this may sound, I actually depend on this unreliable service for my work — and there are days when I simply cannot afford to wait for several hours for someone in charge to notice the problem and go about fixing it. So my problem is probably compounded by the fact that I am using a consumer-level product/service (which is basically sold by my ISP to computer users for home/leisure activities, if only implicitly) for professional-level purposes and applications.

But this reflection leads to even further discouragement, because I really have no alternative but to move to an office in a building that has “proper”, professional-level internet connectivity, in a more central location. This, however, would run against a number of principles on which my current existence is based, including the fact that, by working from home in a rural area, I am making my own tiny contribution to reducing urban concentration and all its associated consequences (pollution, stress, etc.). I strongly believe that many more people could and should be encouraged to work at home — but this would require some major shift in public policy and behaviours in our western, urbanized society, and I just don’t see it happening, even though the technology and the human potential are there.

At this point, I am thinking that a more fitting title for this column would probably have been “Techno Blues”. On the other hand, it is the very uselessness, pointlessness of the “techno rage” that I experienced that led me to this more low-key view of things. So I am hoping that the whole process has helped identify some of the “undercurrents” that characterize much of our computer-related activities at the beginning of this new millennium — which is definitely off to a rocky start.

PostScript

As a postscript, I should mention that, as of Wednesday evening (two days later), the problem doesn’t seem to have entirely disappeared. While things seem to be better overall, I am still experiencing periods during which no servers seem to be responding. Disconnecting and re-connecting seems to help somewhat — but is hardly practical. I was also in the provincial capital Halifax for two days for work and used the same provider from a hotel located down-town, via a modem connection, and I didn’t experience any of this.

I strongly suspect, therefore, that this problem actually has to do with the location of my home — a remote rural area where decent service has always been a bit of an iffy thing, although things seemed to have improved somewhat lately, if not in speed (I’m still stuck at 28.8 kbps even though I use 56 kbps modems everywhere), at least in stability. But things seem to be taking a step backwards again, and I doubt that there is anything I will be able to do about it. “Techno Blues” definitely still is a rather accurate description of this dead-end situation.

Pierre Igot

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