LITTLE AGGRAVATIONS

Little aggravations. I was looking at a credit-card statement and saw a charge from Condé Nast: it was suspiciously small. I went to the website to investigate, and was flummoxed by the security features of their alliteratively misnamed Customer Care, so I relented and called the toll-free number. The idiots renewed my subscription but not the holiday gift subscription for my beloved Junie. With their predatory forays into dynamic pricing, these marketers treat their prospects better than their subscribers and have been bugging me since July, and then couldn’t manage to get the renewals right. Well, it’s been fixed but I’m not happy with the bungling of the same simple instructions I’ve provided for over a decade. GFY, Condé Nast.

Little aggravations. Beginning in the wee hours, the Windows 10 Creators Update cut into my bandwidth: it took almost half a day to upload. Then there were restarts and chunks of time when it was installing and all I could do was watch and gaze upon the warning not to turn off my PC. Then I held my breath as my machine struggled to boot up. Then came the screens touting vaunted new features I neither needed nor desired. Then came the news that I needed a Microsoft account to sync my laptop with my cellphone. Then I noticed that Windows had once again tampered with my default settings for how to open an image and print a page. Then I noticed the bloatware: a tile on my Start screen hawking a pay-to-play virtual-reality app. GFY, Microsoft.