After breakfast this morning I drove Clare to the Dunelm Mill superstore on Newport Road, to buy a special between-the-knees pillow to help avoid hip joint pain when lying in bed. As soon as we left the house there was a heavy downpour of rain. There was traffic chaos at the junction of Cathedral and Cowbridge Road East, due to a collision which slowed down traffic in all directions.
Things got complicated when I received a call from TalkTalk's complaints department while driving. I had to ask for a call back later. This came in while I was entering the store's car park, so I had to defer the call a second time. Third time lucky, we were sitting in the store cafe having a drink. The call was a follow up on our broadband outage before Christmas. I wanted to feed back to the support team about the help desk. The line quality on a mobile phone from the help desk the other side of the world, was poor, the operative spoke too fact with an unfamiliar sounding accent. This made the diagnostic process more difficult and less efficient, as I had to repeat questions and ask for answers to be repeated when I didn't understand.
The trouble shooting process took 45 minutes, twice as long as it needed to as a result. In fact the operative redirected me to the Direct Message channel for completion. When I had a repeat outage a day later, I just used the Direct Message channel, but this also took 45 minutes with all they typing involved and waits for a response. It must be especially difficult for a person calling on an audio landline with no access to a smartphone or computer if the help line operative is hard to understand. Anyway, point taken, and my coffee was cool enough to drink when I rejoined Clare. We drove home by a different route to avoid city centre gridlock. The rain stopped, the clouds parted and the sun shone by the time we had lunch.
Google keeps reminding me my free account storage is more than half full, in the hope that I'll be willing to rent more space. I have no intention of doing this. Occasionally, I check what photo albums I keep in a specific account, then download an album to keep on a spare hard drive, if I see no need to keep that set of photos ready to display. I set out to do this after we'd eaten, and found that I couldn't achieve deletion of photos in an album (and then delete the empty album) as there'd been a change of interface. It took me a couple of hours to find out that I now have to go into the timeline of photos in the cloud in order to locate and delete them and then delete them from the deleted bin. It was much easier previously.
I can imagine users being daunted by this rigmarole and ending up paying for extra storage they don't need. A cunning way to milk users of cash. The use of info about account holders is a massive income generator already. That's what comes from offering free accounts and data storage in the first place. Microsoft does the same. Windows eagerly reminds users to synchronise all their data to One Drive, and it's not easy to prevent this happening by default, Microsoft presumes everyone must want to, but there's a vested interest embedded in this, as the company's AI bots learn everything about users and exploit this to think for you and suggest what you should do - slow steps to enslavement - in my opinion.
We went out for a walk after lunch. There was no return of the morning's rain, it was just cold and windy. Dangerously high winds are threatened for places further north. It looks as if we'll miss out down south however. As ever these days, I needed to walk further than Clare. Her arthritic hip is imposing imitations on her walking, but she doesn't give up! She went out again after supper to sing in a community choir that rehearses in Canton Uniting Church. For me it was time to give some thought about my Sunday sermon. I worked on that for an hour, and then found a new euro thriller series on ITVX in Swedish, Danish, German and English to watch for an hour before bed.
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