I look at such beautiful things around us on campus to get out of frustrations!

We hear the frustration about technologies on a regular basis in our business. It is our job to comfort our users and make sure that in the end they are able to get through and accomplish what they need to.

I was at the receiving end of this during the past couple of weeks and let me tell you, what I had to go through was “so frustrating” and I felt the pain first hand. I tell my staff that unless we really experience what our users experience, we are highly unlikely to know the pain that they are experiencing. So, my frustrations provided me a view into this pain. Thankfully, the frustrations I felt were all outside Wellesley 🙂

I take the time during the holiday break to clean up some of the administrivia related to our personal finances. It is very rare that we spend the break at home because most recently we have been traveling a lot during the holiday breaks. So, I had a lot of time to take care of a few of these things.

First involved making some changes to a benefit for my wife, who works at UConn. We needed to go through the State of CT system for this. They have a fabulous helpdesk and we received the information as quickly as you can expect from an overburdened state system and it was very informational. And the forms they point to are PDFs, so I was so happy to see that they have partially modernized. I would have loved to see them point to a self service web site, but that is a bit too much to ask, even though we are in 2016!

Except, the PDFs were scans of paper and therefore not easily editable. Though it is a pain to add text and images to such a document, thanks to Acrobat, I went past that hurdle! When we ship the electronic version, we get a message back saying. Nope! you will have to print, sign and send it by campus mail. Why? “That is the requirement, blah, blah, blah” I was naturally frustrated.

Secondly, I needed to update the beneficiary designations for us in several benefits and the contingent beneficiary designation is a bit wordy, because this is what we have been advised to use.  Even the most sophisticated financial institutions can’t seem to handle this. I was livid! They give you barely 20 characters for this field. Really? I hate calling on the phone, but I had a lot of time in hand, so I called and asked for help and got nowhere. Bottom line – I am still stuck. I do not want my hard earned money to go to someone else because the system truncated my beneficiary designation, right???

The other one made me even more frustrated. State of CT has changed the financial institutions who handle the employee retirement benefits three times in the past 7 or 8 years. That in itself is frustrating, but apparently they are doing this to benefit us, so it is not that bad. We wanted to consolidate all the funds in one place. Have you ever done this? Good luck and please, when you do this, have a lot of patience and if you believe in prayers, pray a lot!

We initiated the transfer of precious retirement funds from one financial institution to the other. Things looked much simpler than when we did this before, though it required filling things out on real “paper”. But then, institution 1 showed zero balance on a day but nothing in institution 2. Why should this be the case in this day and age? Why can’t this be transmitted electronically from one to the other? So, we wait, wait and wait. We give them some slack for holidays, and then wait. Finally we end up writing to the institution that is supposed to receive it. The usual stuff – sorry, I am not responsible, you must call and speak with someone. And you know, I hate calling, so my wife did. Nothing. Now, just imagine, close to 12 days in limbo – you have no idea where your hard earned money is. Finally it arrived.

This is plain ridiculous and frustrating beyond belief. Let us remind ourselves that we are in 2016 and living in a country with one of the most sophisticated technical infrastructure. Frankly, I have much better experience in these matters in India. I can go on, as always, so I will stop and celebrate one thing that made my life so simple that I still cannot believe!

My laptop’s display blanked out and I got a new Mac laptop. While waiting for the new one to come, I was using the broken Mac with a connection to an external monitor. All I needed help with from my staff was an appropriate thunderbolt cable to connect the two laptops together. I disabled filevault on my broken Mac and initiated Migration Assistant. It took about 1 1/2 hours (I have about 700 GB on my disk. Don’t ask me why!). There was a long pause towards the end, but I told myself to leave everything alone. Several minutes later, it was done, as in, that’s it, done!

I started the new computer and all the files were there and it worked just like, I mean, exactly like, my broken computer. It knew about the WiFi connection, so it connected me, chrome opened up with all the tabs (this is more credit to Chrome, of course). It was unbelievable. I took it to our condo in Framingham and everything connected and simply worked. I came home to CT last night, and everything worked. Just amazing. Go Apple!

Now, why can’t the technology operations of DMVs, other state offices, financial institutions, all be run by Apple. Please, tell me why not?