COMPUTERS CAN'T BE WRONG!!!

 Well well well vindication is mine saith the Dave! Vengeance is certainly too much to ask for when battling the "Entity" that is in control of Canada right now, but I got me some vindication and that is about as sweet as it can get for a lowly worm like me. How did I get my vindication you probably didn't ask? Well let me tell you anyway...

Remember a few posts ago when I was bellyaching about the evil member of the Telecom Triumvirate, Telus (Telus What You Have For Brains)? I explained how they are continuing to harass me even though I turned in my router (and got money back for it) in the midst of month-to-month payments that were fully paid in the 2nd week of September when I left Trail and moved here to Calgary. They even sent a letter to my Mom and got her worried so she called me and asked what she should do about it. I told her to open it and it was a bill so I told her to please wipe her ass with it and throw it away. She said she'd do half of that. 

I have given up trying to cancel my internet. I tried going to the place I signed up and they said I couldn't do it there. I tried online and couldn't figure it out. I tried calling and there was no way to do it that way. I tried responding to the emails and texts they send and got an immediate message back saying I couldn't reply to the email/text. Today I got an email and I thoroughly checked it for some way to cancel my Telus internet which I haven't used for 2 1/2 months but for which I have accrued a bill for well over 200 bucks. I found a new number that started with 310 so called it expecting the usual telephone gymnastics that go nowhere. After a few questions asked by a computer I was told the earliest operator was an hour away but I was given an option of getting a call back so I took that. It took about an hour but I DID get a call back. I answered and it was ANOTHER computer. When I say that I mean a recorded message waiting for you to say something then use voice recognition tech to set up another recorded message in response to your response. I thought I was in for yet another dead end but shockingly I was asked by the recording if I wanted to speak to an operator. I said as snarkily as possible "Well DUH!!!!" No, I said yes. No point being snarky to a recording. And after a little waiting music LOW AND BEHOLD I got through to a human being!

I didn't allow myself to get excited though. Human beings at Telus had failed me (and lied to me) before. So I explained to the Filipina on the other end, I forget her name, the whole story. She didn't lie to me or cheat me or anything. She just looked at my account and told me it had a balance of zero. Well what is all this stuff I've been getting then? She said she didn't know either. So she asked all my ID information and made sure I was who I said I was. Then she asked the email address of the people who have been sending the emails. She didn't say anything but I am pretty sure this has happened before judging by the things she was saying. It reminded me of the time my TD bank account was hacked. They didn't act surprised either cuz it happens a lot. IT HAPPENS A LOT.

So, if you were, like everyone including my Mom who opened my fake bill, assuming that it was MY fault, it wasn't. This whole time everyone has been giving me the old skeptical agreement faces while I told this story. That's what we're trained to do! COMPUTERS ARE NEVER WRONG, are they? I was right, the computer was wrong. For the umpteenth time since coming back to Canada 8 months ago.

So I hang up the phone feeling like I'd won the lottery. I BEAT the omnipotent Telus! I wouldn't have to pay the 278 bucks, they wouldn't increase that bill, I wouldn't get any more emails or texts or.... BBBRRRIIIINNNNGGG! (That was my phone. It doesn't really ring. Most of our phones don't ring anymore. But the sound effect still works) "Hello how is your day going?" "Good." "Well I'm about to make it better. You have qualified for several discounts on your Telus service -" "I'm not interested." "But you haven't even heard the offers." "I'm not interested in Telus, thank you. Bye." Click. (My phone didn't really click, I just hit the red phone circle and ended the call. But the sound effect still works.)

Wait a minute, I'm just getting started. My teaching job had to set me up on their computer payment plan called ADP. I was on something similar with Tech in Trail and I had to walk in to work to submit my hours online cuz the computer pay program didn't work from my home. Security helping me out again. 😊 SO nice of them! Well the same thing happened with ADP. It wouldn't work on my home computer because I couldn't open up my company email from home and get the ADP invitation email. I went through a long ordeal with my boss practically begging her to just send the email to my normal email but she wouldn't budge. As it turns out, it didn't matter because not only does the company email have a problem, ADP has a problem. This, I'm told, is a payment platform used by thousands of employers across Canada. And since it's a computer program, IT CAN'T BE WRONG! It must be ME who is fucking things up. Well I went in to work and Dwayne the IT guy couldn't figure out the problem I had with email either so he used a workaround which worked. I had to access it through a different browser. Neither of us know why that worked but whatever. Then we logged onto ADP while at work on my work computer and it worked. Problem solved, right?

The other day Jia sent me a message that I hadn't specified my hours as "teaching" on my hours. I'm at home because it's Sunday. So I go to ADP and log on. It sends a secret code to my phone because, you know, security, my protection. I plug the code into the space for it and I get stuck in an infinite redirection loop saying, "This page isn't working. recruiting.adp,com has redirected you too many times. Try deleting your cookies." So I tell this to Jia and she says it might be because I am using my phone (which I wasn't) or because I need to clear my browser history (which I did a few times in the next two hours during which I was trying to unfuck the fucked up ADP site). I tried a pile of things. I even searched the problem and found out that IT HAPPENS A LOT. Different people have tried different things. Some say it's the Bing search toolbar, many called ADP and were told they had a virus, some used a registry hack... this I did not try because I don't like messing with my registry. I cleared cache, files, history, cookies, chocolate bars, and sleeves and sleeves of Fig Newtons but all it did was extend my computer time trying to refill my cache and browsing history so that I don't have to remember passwords and websites all the time. I still went to the ADP site and got stuck in the infinite redirection loop. The only diff was it stopped giving me the cellphone code, it just went straight to "Try fixing the problem originating on our end by messing with YOUR computer because... COMPUTERS ARE NEVER WRONG." 

The next day I logged on without incident, corrected my hours by adding "teaching" which is over 90% of most TEACHERS' hours yet it isn't an option on the dropdown menu. You have to start typing "teaching" before it becomes an option. Why not change this? BECAUSE COMPUTERS ARE NEVER WRONG. 

THEN after starting my new job at a warehouse in Calgary I was sent an email. "You need to register with ADP." Swell. So I did the whole shpeil again and again I got trapped in the infinite redirection loop. And again after waiting a day it worked. Now I find that if I log in through their website, it doesn't work, but if I log in through the link I got from them via email, both work. I am sure I'm not the only one! But we all just let these glitches slide and act like computers are this wonderful revolution! How long till we learn the hard way they aren't? Are you seeing a pattern to this post? As always I'm about a decade behind the Simpsons. They predicted this overdependence and complete surrender to computers a long time ago.

What follows the ominous ending to this vid is a visit to Itchy and Scratchy Land where the robots go haywire and start killing people. 

The worst part about the whole thing for me is that I get blamed for the problems. We had a meeting Monday and Jia brought up the fact that a lot of people have been doing the ADP wrong, forgetting to do it, or maybe having computer problems like me. She didn't specify exactly but she did say that if we don't do it right, we don't get paid. I'd say that's forced surrender, wouldn't you? But that wasn't the end of it. THEN Kerry pipes up and says, "I don't think you should need to be reminded that computer literacy is expected of you all. It was a prerequisite to your hiring." Okay so now, because COMPUTERS ARE NEVER WRONG, we're all computer illiterates. But hang on a sec, I TEACH 1L/2L. Those L's stand for literacy. Some of my students are unable to read and write in English or even their own languages. So what we do is we teach level 1 and 2 stuff but literacy students are given more help and more time on tests and anything you need to do to differentiate your teaching to accommodate them, go ahead. Because students are not the same. They're all unique. We must practice learner-centered education.

As for the teachers - fuck them! We'll standardize everything they do, treat them like they're identical robots, and blame them when anything goes wrong. We can't blame the infallible computers can we?

This is not a practice confined to my workplace. I am discovering that it is spreading across Canada like a Chinese manufactured immunodeficiency virus... might... if it ever happened. 😒 The US too? No surprise. It seems to me I have spent a long time in Asia watching their education systems go the opposite way. When I got there teachers were told to stick to the standardized curriculum. No autonomy. No creativity, No differentiation. Now there is almost complete autonomy for teachers to do what they feel the students will learn best from. Is it possible that with the massive influx of foreigners to Canada (many from Asia) they are bringing their old education habits with them? And weak educators across the country are just abandoning the years of hard work their predecessors did to get us beyond those bad habits? I think it may be possible. At least it seems a possible contributor. 

At any rate, my message today is more about computers and our premature dependence on them that is likely to bite us all in the arse. In the outset of this post I used the word "Entity." It was in reference to the latest in the Mission Impossible series. I recommend that movie. There is silly car chases and last second escapes like all action movies but the story is interesting. I think it is not only possible but likely to happen soon if it hasn't already. Check it out.

In conclusion, computers CAN be wrong and often ARE wrong. They're not better than people... yet. They certainly can't teach as well as humans and never will be able to. They are being pushed onto the human race for profit, more than technological advancement. As consumers we need to figure out how to slow the pace of this technological revolution so that profit keeps pace with advancement. In my opinion the profit has far outstripped the advancement and needs to be reigned WAAAAY the fuck in as do our well manufactured opinions of the infallibility of all technology.  

Or maybe I'm becoming an old fuddy duddy. What do you think?