Pluggers by Rick McKee for July 10, 2024

About 6 months ago, my email stopped working. My archive files were still there and I could open and read everything, but nothing was being received or sent. And I got a confusing error message that [like most error messages] told me absolutely nothing. I assumed I had a virus or had been spoofed [someone else was reading all my ads and solicitations], so I contacted a computer debugger who checked my system. He took the error message I had received and did the on-line query and discovered that over 65,000 people had already posted about the same problem. Of course, none of them had a solution — why should they? They aren’t coders or computer experts. They don’t have access to the code. They are just people who purchased a computer expecting it to work.

His solution was to change the browser I was using for my email, which had been Safari — Mac’s very own special browser! So, my email is now, ironically, on Google Chrome. And so far it is working well.

I have long resented being an unpaid, unappreciated ‘beta’ tester for computers and phones. The whole gimmick of updating software without adequate expert testing is disgusting. Would you intentionally drive a car that went from the drawing board to the showroom floor without all its capabilities being carefully tested? Look what happens in the air industry if adequate testing and maintenance isn’t being done. One dropped wheel or missing door and the whole industry is under scrutiny to see what went wrong and whom to blame [and possibly how to fix it]. Why should a computer or phone purchaser be the one left to find the flaws? And, just as important, why isn’t the company doing the “updates” responsible for providing ’"fix-it" assistance when those updates overwrite or otherwise screw-up existing systems?