Another reason to hate THEM

I haven't had a good rant on this blog in months but today's the day.  I woke up this morning, sat down at the computer, and discovered that while I slept the people at Google (I think -- although you can never discount the possibility that it's the people at Microsoft) had totally screwed up my settings for the internet.

In the olden days (and I don't mean the days of manual typewriters, just the good old days before the war in Iraq) you would set your computer the way you liked it, and it stayed that way.  If something got updated, it was up to you to find the update and if you wanted, install it.  Perhaps you missed something nifty for a while, or forever, but if you liked what your software did and how it was configured, you got to keep it as long as you liked.

Now your computer is never safe from THEM.  While you sleep, they sneak in and make things better.   Whether or not you think they're better or not, you're stuck with them, at least until you manage to turn them off.  Which is not always possible. 

Today's "improvement" has changed the way my internet screen looks.  The tabs aren't where I look for them.  The blogger interface works different.  I can't find the "history" listing at all, so if I want to reconstruct where I read that interesting blog post day before yesterday, I'm s.o.l.  I suspect there are other features of this update that I will dislike when I discover them. 

I hate it when THEY decide that I need help.  First THEY came up with automatic capitalization while I typed away on Word.  Since I often like to make lists that begin with lowercase letters, this was a pain in the neck.  Through several updates I was able to turn that feature off, but then THEY took away that option.  Lately my email program won't let me write, for instance, comment(s).  When it sees the character string (s) it replaces those characters with a smily face, and I throw up.

You may be old enough, or addicted enough to old movies, to remember the old James Coburn flick "The President's Analyst."  The vast conspiracy at the heart of the caper traced back to The Telephone Company (and you may be old enough to remember life before AT&T was busted).  Now we have no Telephone Company, just 12,000 telephone companies.  But THEY are smart enough to regroup as the world changes. 

I hate THEM.  Makes me wish I had a gun so when THEY sneak into my office in the dead of night, I could blow THEM away.  No jury would convict me.