$120 per month cellphone hell

Last month I found I was paying $120 per month for Sprint service with a four year old iPhone.

Does that sound right to you?  It doesn't sound right to me.  It seems my friends are paying less than half that much for newer phones.

This just seemed to creep up on me.  In 2014 I remember originally buying a new phone for $22/mo payments with $60 "unlimited" service, when my previous $50/mo service at AT&T was not unlimited, so I thought that was a better deal than AT&T.  Original payments were indeed about $82 per month, as I had expected.  That didn't seem unreasonable, consider I was also getting a brand new iPhone 6S Plus, the ultimate, with no trade in.  I believed I was also signed up for "iPhone Forever" which would let me get a new trade-ins Every Year.

About 14 months later I went to another Sprint store, asking about my upgrade.  They told me I couldn't actually upgrade to a new phone without paying a few hundred dollars.  They said my plan only permitted "free" upgrades every other year, and I had to pay extra to upgrade Every Year.  So I declined.  I must have had some misunderstanding, maybe I got the cheaper iPhone Forever plan, or maybe they sold me some other kind of lease, these things are so complicated it's hard to know what you have actually signed up for.  In the store, you wait around for an hour or more, and when they do see you it all goes by very quickly and the choices you have are far different from what you might have expected, and then it all comes out in an unintelligible mass of printed receipt and/or email.

Sometime in 2016, I really wanted to get an iPhone 8S Plus.  It was well over 2 years since my original contract, I figured this should be easy.  But it was hard.  I don't recall if I did have iPhone Forever, but I recall not wanting to keep it if I did.  I purchased the old 6S Plus for my electronics collection for what sounded reasonable $200 or so, and thought I would be purchasing my phone over time, which cost a little more than my previous lease.  Since I was somewhat concerned about breakage, I got insurance, which I recall cost about $10.  It all came to $90 something, which sounded OK at the time.

I remember this as an especially unpleasant upgrade experience, not that it took long though.  I had to keep remembering passwords, which I couldn't remember.  To make it worse there seemed to be both a phone passcode, and a carrier passcode.  I could only remember the phone passcode.  Eventually the process was completed, and I hoped not to go through it again.

My payment did go up, but I expected it to because it was purchase instead of glorified lease.  Since I was no longer on iPhone Forever, or at least they seemed to tell me that, I should eventually pay off the phone and own it, or so I thought.  When that had happened to me with my first iPhone on AT&T, after about 2.5 years my payment actually dropped down.

Instead, payments just seemed to go up and up every few months like cable service.  I got some notice about changes in the "insurance "plan that didn't look good at all.  It looked as though if I were to break my phone, I'd only get a discount on a new phone, which maybe wasn't worth that much.  But, generally speaking, I had a full time job and far too many other concerns to bother cancelling a $10 (and later $15) extra monthly charge, and maybe I'd actually use the insurance after all.  So I didn't make any changes, though I thought if I were a penny pincher, I would.

And the monthly charges seemed to rise and rise.  So what at one point was little more than $90, I though, nearly 4 years later not only had my payment not fallen from having paid off the phone, it had shot up by $25 bucks or so, without my having changed anything.

Finally, after over 2 years of wondering why I was being ripped off so badly for cellphone service, but having far more important concerns than saving $30 next month, I finally got around to trying to get my cellphone bill lowered, by purchasing the phone outright, getting a cheaper service plan, and cancelling the "insurance."

It was a 4 hour online and text chat experience worthy of another post. Endlessly frustrating and laced with anxiety that there would be some screwup, and I'd have to start all over again, or I'd have all my phone payments forgotten, end up owing far more, or endless other mishaps.  Except for COVID-19, I would have preferred to go to a store, even though I know those aren't necessarily sweet and easy experiences either.  This time it seemed like my first two "chat" experiences weren't even with a real person, but it seemed my 3rd and successful time was, though there were 10-20 minute pauses between texts when you wouldn't know if anything was going to happen, or end up with a screwed up account.  Ultimately my 3rd and successful series of texts spanned 90 minutes.

It wasn't at all clear the agent was trying to me much money.  It seemed more like they would prefer to sell me a new phone and new contract just like before.

When I insisted on lower payments, they suggested what seemed like only a small change in my service price (which had apparently risen to $70 somehow).  I insisted on removing the insurance and buying the phone.

Actually I had started this process by figuring out how to access my online account again.  That took awhile, but I did finally remember my password and username.  Then I saw numbers like thise:

Monthly Lease: $33/mo  (ok, I can see how that would contributed to a $120 bill)
Purchase: $238

It doesn't take much math to see that the purchase price is far less than the monthly lease for another whole year.  But nobody suggested this change.  I insisted on it over and over and it took another 60 minutes to get the deal done over text, and even then I had to complete the purchase online on my computer, where it wasn't obvious that the $220 charge was the $198 price I had agreed to (with tax and charges).

I clicked on the box which said "purchase phone" and a little box popped up and said I had to use chat to do that.  First tried the online chat, which got nowhere, it said it couldn't do that either.  I then proceeded to do chat from my phone, from the phone Sprint app, which led me to texting with "agents", which took in all about 2.5 hours.

It was bad, though not quite as bad as with the old XM Radio service...

Now I think I've got it changed like I wanted anyway.  I purchased my phone for $200 plus tax and switched to $50 unlimited plan with no insurance.  My new payments are supposed to be just over $50 per month.

We'll see.

Actually, the Sprint website actually advertised a $35 unlimited service, and provide your phone.  But the agent over text told me I could not get that plan.  He said I could get the 55+ plan.  I couldn't get an answer as to whether that was the cheapest unlimited data and text plan I could get.  That's the way it goes, they offer something off the shelf and it's take it or leave it.  And leave it means you'll have to buy another phone, most likely.  (So I may still be paying a $15 idiot tax, at least.  Somebody smart probably wouldn't have paid that.)

The way the industry has structured itself, you don't really have much choice, unless you really just want to keep buying $1200 phones every two years.  If you have a Sprint phone you are locked into Sprint, because their radio system is not the same as with other carriers.  And so on.  You feel like you are trapped in John Steinbeck's novel The Pearl.

Roon Radio Pros and Cons

I like Roon.  After years of floundering, Roon gives me more or less the music playing experience I've always wanted, on my existing Sonos nodes, my mac, and Oppo BDP-205 players.  I now have high resolution recordings, album covers, album notes, and everything right there.  It plays high resolution recordings on everything as best it can be played on them.

When Roon Radio plays music from my own library, it does pretty good too, much better than Sonos "random play."  (Nothing, however, in my experience, created a more pleasant automatic personalized radio than Pandora Premium.)

A problem is that Roon Radio does NOT default to playing on my own library.  It defaults to being open to all my services.  Right now, that's just Tidal.  Tidal has a great selection of the world's recorded music but they are always pushing their own artists and titles.

The result is that by default Roon Radio ALWAYS plays something totally out of line with what I like.  I may be listening to soft ambient music when it's finished Roon Radio switches me to some loud aggressive Hip Hop, since Hip Hop is a Tidal specialty.   I would guess this is because Tidal rates all of their own music as "10" in category and parameter, so that's what you always going to get.  I absolutely positively HATED TIDAL before I got Roon.  I was planning on cancelling Tidal for years because I could never use it effectively, and did therefore almost never use it, but hoped I would soon figure it out so I could one day enjoy CD quality streaming.  No matter what I looked for on Tidal, I only found the most awful stuff.  Then Roon made it possible, for the first time, to find the things I actually wanted to listen to on Tidal, and I'm happy with the Roon/Tidal combination, though people now tell me I might like QOBUZ better.

And now I get to the little gripe that inspired this post.  Roon Radio has (seemingly deliberately) hidden the Limit Roon Radio to Library switch.  "Roon Radio" reserves a large chunk of the Roon window just for blank space.  (Tufte would be outraged.)  At the bottom of this blank chunk of screen (where, you might have user controls over the Roon Radio of some kind) there is just one control shown.  The Start Roon Radio After Music Ends switch.

The essential Limit Roon Radio to Library is hidden behind 3 dots at the top of the playlist where a bunch of obscure playlist features are.

Now I can see why they would make this switch hard to find.  Obviously Tidal wants everyone to play their stuff (and annoyingly so) so I wonder if there is some money involved.  If Roon is playing Tidal promoted music, do they get a kickback???  Probably not explicitly, but even if there is no explicit kickback, there is often some kind of hidden pressure.  Roon may get better service from Tidal if they make Tidal happy.

Avoidance of such kind of hidden pressure is why Roon is such a great concept in the first place.  Nearly everything online serves the House Interest and has no particular need to Serve the Customer.  Roon breaks the mold by being a User Agent.  At least it ought to be a User Agent considering that we do pay for it, and pretty well.  We are paying for the services, not the music itself.  We pay separately for the music (to some companies that reduce that cost by doing their own self-promotion in the process).

It was maintaining that status of being a User Agent is precisely the reason I chose and continue to choose to pay for my Roon account annually.  I have a great fear that as soon as I plunk down the money for Lifetime Service the company is going to start aggressively seeking other sources of revenue, such as kickbacks from streaming companies...  Meanwhile, Roon was threatening from Day One to give extra services to Lifetime Subscribers only.  I'm hoping that doesn't amount to much.  If Roon stays viable, I will eventually pay far more for Annual Service than Lifetime Service. And if it doesn't, it would be a shame without something better.

I feel that paying every year for service should (hopefully) give me some kind of leverage, to keep the company serving the customer interest.  If not, I might be able to go elsewhere too, with no loss of sunk capital as such.

I learned this horrible lesson many years ago.  For many years I subscribed to Audio Magazine, one of my favorites, annually.  A number of times I forgot to renew and ended up missing issues.  Finally I decided I'd get a 3 year subscription.  The very next year Audio Magazine went straight downhill.  The magazine shrunk to a fraction of it's size.  Finally, it went out of business altogether and my subscription was converted to 2 years of Stereo Review, a magazine I had always (though perhaps wrongly) hated.

WHENEVER anything is given away free (as in free beer) by a commercial enterprise you can assume there is some kind of con going on.  If we really want good service, we have to pay for it.

Now today I was in a panic.  I was intending to turn Roon Radio off but instead turned off the Limit Roon Radio to Library switch.  Once you select that option, it does indeed appear at the bottom of the otherwise wasted side screen of Roon Radio.  But if, perchance, you mistakenly switch it off, the very switch itself disappears.

I panic'd thinking that Roon had summarily decided to remove this switch to keep their Tidal arrangements flowing.  THAT was what the last update was actually about, I wrongly guessed.

Actually, I had merely forgotten that when I enabled the switch the first time, I had gone to the 3 magic dots.  I had read somewhere online you could do that, and I did.  But by the time I mistakenly turned the switch off, a few weeks later, I had forgotten all that.

Another online search and I fixed the problem.  But IMO well designed software shouldn't require you to endlessly go online to get the answers, and the answers aren't always easy to find online for various reasons.  (One of my worst examples of that is the sound program SOX, which has gone through many major revisions, such that any instructions you find online are most likely for a version you don't have.)

Another curious thing.  The Roon Help feature has absolutely nothing to say about Roon Radio.  It almost does really seem like they want to leave you at the mercy of the Music Services on this Radio thing.

An idea to prevent viral pandemics

It's already been established that face masks worn casually by the general public (and not professionals, who do things such as discard after each use using gloves) don't protect well from viruses.

But, what about this.  A tracker to discourage you from touching your face?

Based on the intuitive idea of biofeedback, so, just as you would be reaching up to your face, the tracker detects that immediately and buzzes before you get there, so you are made conscious of this movement.

 Or a mask that's just a very open screen you put over your entire face.

Such a screen could also have anti-viral anti-bacterial properties by materials and electrification.

Fitness Tracker

After reading a few bad reviews of the Fitbit Charge 3 (mainly due to device non-responsiveness, screen print size,  and other "failures") I decided to get a Garmin Vivosmart 4.  I also liked the more compact size combined with pulse ox.  I often hated the bulk of conventional digital watches and was happy to quit using them when I got a smartphone to keep track of time.

After a few hours use, this is what I'm finding:

1) Responsiveness is fine, though it seemed poor at first (did it learn or did I learn) and also during designated "sleep" period (so I can't use "sleep" as a way to turn off notifications for half the day)

2) The "button" seems far less responsive than the automatic display.  Sometimes I can pound on it for quite awhile and nothing happens...and when it does maybe because of unintended gesturing during the button pressing process.

3) The screen print is fine, pleasant surprise.

4)  If it were up to me, I'd choose the Pulse display.  I have issues with my pulse (low rate) and it's   one of the reasons I got this thing.  But that appears to be one thing you can't select as the default display.  For awhile I couldn't figure out how to not have a TIME display by default.  I do not like TIME display, I find it anxiety provoking.  It would be nice if you could configure a custom display from 2-3 subwidgets.  I'm not using STEP as the default because it's the most sensitive to general activity.  But it doesn't respond much to weightlifting when that hand isn't used.  The Calorie display therefore may be more broadly resolving as it includes pulse, but it doesn't have the resolution to show walking from one side of the house to the other (not one calorie).  Some combination of the two, or a Calorie display down to 0.1 calorie might be better.

6) I don't want any kinds of notifications from my phone.  No notifications about calls, texts, or emails.  These are all horrible distractions I'm trying to get away from.  ESPECIALLY if I happen to be napping or sleeping.  I think I've set it up for this through the app, but it was not entirely obvious.  When they say "notification" they seem to mean the tracker notifying the phone, rather than the reverse.

I might find notifications OK if they followed my phone setting exactly.  When I muted the phone, it would mute the tracker as well.  I doubt it works this way.  I don't want to have to be bothered with muting TWO THINGS, and it doesn't appear you can "mute" the tracker either, except by changing its preferences to disallow notifications, if that's what I did, I'm not sure.

7) So I set a sleep time hoping to be sure I wouldn't be distracted.  I don't yet sleep fixed hours, and I sleep in two parts (including an afternoon nap).  So setting just one sleep time doesn't really work for me.  And if you're still "sleeping" according to your preset preferences, it appears the tracker is even less responsive.

8) The device seemed only half charged as I was going to bed.  So I took it off and hooked to charger.  I had been discouraged that it was showing so few steps from my having walked around the house before going to bed.  When I got up, miraculously, it was now showing 600 steps that it had somehow picked up while the tracker was on the countertop being charged.  Were those the steps that I had taken before going to be that it finally figured out?  Or some kind of weird error?  There does not appear to be any way to "reset" the number of steps or anything.

Accidental Failures

I'm not at all upset now, but until my 3rd phone call to TIAA to get my annuity payments started I was in a greater and greater panic.  For once, everything worked fine on the 3rd phone call and I got the required paperwork actually printed out while they were on the line (which is what you must do, it seems).  Once they received the paperwork, they seem to have processed it the same day with my payments starting tomorrow.  Couldn't be better.

But prior to the 3rd phone call I was in greater and greater panic.  It seemed that little progress had been made in the first 2 phone calls.  And it seemed it was not possible to generate the needed forms
on the website--though it seemed I had come tantalizingly close running the "visualizer" myself, which you can do, but going from the visualizer to the required forms was the part I could just never do.  Forms prepared during the second phone call and nearly printed out simply disappeared, so there was no way I could continue to try after doing browser updates on my side.  Static forms available for download were entirely inapplicable.  There was no directly applicable phone menu choice, so it required about 5 minutes of phone menu navigating before I could get on hold to get a live agent, with nothing else being of the least use.  And it seemed no progress at all had been made in handling my electronic submission of a birth certificate.  It sat there in an online locker for months with no acknowledgement.

TIAA is, I feel, far better than most, perhaps the best.  It is a non-profit mutually profit-sharing fund of funds for professors and scientists, so it's not as prone to all the usual rip-offs.  But wrapped in the same web wallpaper of modern software failures and inconveniences, it can be damning too.  Nicely, the TIAA application I ultimately filled out today did allow me to do an up to 10% pre-withdrawal, so I could have made up for 3 months or more of previously lost payments.  (I decided not to take that, as my cash level is fine right now, I just want to get those monthly payments started asap so it stays that way, and so I can feel it's a done deal and I can get on with my life, instead of having more still unsolved crisis that mean the end of many luxuries.)  Hopefully from this point on my annuity payments will soon begin, as I was promised today.  But up until today, for 3 months, I had been seething with fear and frustration, all the more because I didn't have the time and mental energy to get this taken care of after the two previous stressful failed attempts.

THIS time I was better prepared.  I had the latest version of the Chrome browser (updated yesterday) installed on my Mac (which itself was just updated last week).  I opened the TIAA website in Chrome just before calling TIAA.  I kept clicking on things on the website to keep it open, because if it closed, I might get stuck again on another of those "identify all the buses" quizzes that I can't ever seem to get correct in order to get it opened again.  (Thanks Chrome.  It would be easier just to type in my password.)

Normally I use Safari but it seemed possible that Safari was at the root of some previous problems.  However, even previous attempts to use Chrome failed, so I'm not sure Safari was at fault.  One nice thing about Safari is that it never bothers with the "identify all the buses" test.

Like all the previous TIAA representatives, this very thorough and patient representative promised to send paper copies to me also in the US mail.  (I asked specifically about the US MAIL because when they say "we'll mail it to you" it's not always clear what that means.)  I suppose it's moot now that I finally got the forms downloaded and printed out, but twice before after running into failures in the downloading and printing process, I was waiting and hoping for forms to arrive in the US mail and nothing but junkmail from TIAA ever arrived.

Prior to this latest phone call (actually it was the second call today as the first one got disconnected midstream*) things were looking pretty grim.  The TIAA website itself is almost entirely nothing but marketing.  I've wasted endless time trying to get something out of it myself, at first thinking it would be just a push-button selection, but later understanding that I'd need to download a document, prepare it, and send it in.  I though it had even been said to me I could do that--all by myself.  But nothing I tried worked.  Earlier today was the final straw, I went straight to the Support menu (where I had not spent much time before), drilled down to the Transaction Forms, then into the Withdrawal forms, then in the two flavors of Annunity Withdrawal forms, fixed and variable.  As it turned out, both linked to the same "defined benefit" form which was clearly not the one I needed.  I had seen the likes of what I needed before, as prepared by the first representative I talked to in December, and it looked nothing like that.  Meanwhile I couldn't simply use the one from December, because it allocated the wrong fund allocations and I changed my allocations right after that to simplify things.  I tried endlessly to get it changed to the way I needed, and after many failures I ultimately deleted it, thinking it was blocking the creation of a new one I was trying to enable through the retirement income "visualizer."  But no matter what I did, I couldn't create a new form either.  I needed to have another representative prepare this form for me anew.

But hoping I could do this myself, and therefore control exactly how it was done, I wasted hours on the website.  Almost everything you click on, no matter how promising it sounds, it basically an infomertial trying to convince you to put more money in your account.   Though it never says this anywhere on the website, it seems that in order to annuitize your funds and get payments started, you apparently must call in, get an agent to pre-prepare the required forms, download them, and mail them in.  Having had nothing but failures with the electronic document upload system, and wasted hours trying to get it to work with forms I was previously sent, I've decided to stick with US mailing documents in.

(*Midstream disconnection also happened when I had been on the line waiting to speak with a Social Security representative.  That time I was told I would have to wait over 40 minutes (and btw, when it says that, try the next day instead) and after 25 minutes waiting on hold I simply got disconnected.  I'm thinking there's an issue where my phone may disconnect if my check touches the screen in the wrong place, and I think that's what may have happened today on my first call to TIAA.  So to prevent that from happening, I now handle these high stakes long phone calls in "speakerphone" mode.  But then, in speakerphone mode, it seems like if the phone isn't constantly moving, it times out and hangs up.  That also happened to me one time.  So now what I do is I put the phone in speakerphone mode but also continue to hold it in my hand, just not up to my ear, as if I were talking to a rock.)

That's the thing about dealing with the web.  It may seem like the web interface could be just as capable as a live person.  But they never even come close.  For one thing, there is no trivial way to pass documents back and forth, and sign them, as you might do at an actual insurance agent's office.  The computer doesn't trust that you are the same person from one moment to the next (and indeed, some spoofer might not be).  So everything is confounded and impossible, if it can be done at all, which usually isn't the case anyway.

In he prior 3 months I made 2 major attempts to begin annuity payments from my TIAA account.   That includes 2 phone calls that were answered an in which I had a serious conversation lasting more than 20 minutes with a live TIAA assistant.  (The second call lasted 48 minutes.)  In every case, it appeared I'd only moved backwards from my goal, as each time more eForms appear to need to be filled out, while becoming more impossible to do so.  In each phone call, it seemed like I was being promised that I would receive hardcopies IN THE US MAIL that I could fill out by hand and therefore avoid all the foibles that seem to make the online document completion impossible.  Neither time did I receive anything in the US MAIL except more and more TIAA junk mail.  Meanwhile, I received an eDocument after each phone call, but not what I was expecting.

Along with those phonecalls, before and after, I've spent a good portion of a half dozen or more days fiddling with the TIAA website and thinking about it.

And that is just part of 3 months worrying about it, worrying about how long it's going to take to get payments started, whether by the time I do the payment amounts will have dropped (which I'm always fearing it just did) or worse.  For these months, I've been very busy with holiday parties and other things.  Now that the holidays are over, I'm going to bear down on this particular problem "full time" until I get it solved (possibly taking time off for my taxes a couple months from now, if I can't get it solved by then).

It was far easier, btw, to begin payments with Social Security.  There was an online application that took about 3 hours to fill out.  It was a "40 minute" application but required some research and thinking, so I filled it out over the course of several days.  It was an entirely online process (no need to scan or upload signed documents).   Although I seem to recall the browser remaining open the whole time, I was also provided an identification number I could use to continue filling out the same application.  It only got tricky later, when I tried to update my earnings record.  It wasn't at all clear how to do that so I had to call Social Security on the phone.  THAT wasn't easy because of the long waits.  But ultimately, when I did get them online, they simply told me about the form I needed to fill out and I did that.  I simply searched online for the form, downloaded it, printed it, filled it out in pen, and mailed it back.  I could have been spared the need to call Social Security on the phone if they had simply made the required form more obvious, rather than simply saying I needed to contact Social Security to update my earnings record.

I suppose it's possible that in some instances I'm being particularly stupid somehow, and we can't blame TIAA for that.  And there are failures that are going to occur anyway, because computer systems, especially computer systems with human interfaces, and especially web systems, are so highly unreliable across the variety of different browsers, operating systems, and versions of these, and other things.  Which shows how totally off all techno utopianism is--we can't even get computers to do simple things well, and we imagine them mastering everything.  But anyway, I can't blame TIAA for those kinds of failures either.  But taken as a whole, it seems like the whole system is rigged against me, as if I'm trapped in John Steinbeck's novel, The Pearl, I've got this wonderful retirement fund, but I can't seem to get my pension started.

But, but, this is the essence of modern computing.  It is rigged against us, by design.  It is meant to be completely opaque on our side, so we can't see how we're being sliced, diced, ripped-off, and sold on the backside.  We're not supposed to know what's being done or have any way of affecting it, except by a few very limited "user-friendly" controls that do little or nothing.



I had figured this process would be little more than a push-button when I started in December.  I thought to myself, I'll do TIAA and then move on to Social Security.  Instead, I whipped off my Social Security Application in one of the gaps in time when I was (falsely) waiting for some TIAA documents to arrive in the US Mail, only to have to try TIAA later with another phone call.

Despite all appearances, you cannot actually begin Annuity Payments through the website.  It is a complex process I have yet to get to the bottom of, so I can't be sure, but it seems somehow you have to get the correct forms printed out, sign them or whatever, and mail them back to TIAA.  Fine.  But don't fall into the trap I did of trying to use electronic documents instead...  You will not find it easy, and then once you have succeeded in getting your signed electronic documents posted back to the website and "submitted," it's not clear that anyone ever looks at them.  I've never gotten any kind of acknowledgement regarding my electronic submissions.  I may have made mistakes, but couldn't somebody or some robot tell me that???

That the process of starting Annuity Payments involves printing the correctly formatted form (with all the right info identifying the particular funds involved, the pensioner, and options selected) and US mailing it back is not actually described anywhere on the website.  I only learned this from the my first phonecall, when the first feeble attempts were made to get the proper form filled out with the funds and options I wanted.

In my latest phone conversation, it appeared there were issues because on one of my contracts (or perhaps both, I'm confused at this point) listed my name by first initial only, whereas my actual name needs to be given.  So, after my last call, they sent me a Name Change form to fill out.  The problem is, this Name Change form REQUIRES that I provide a Court Date and other information about how my name changed.  It doesn't seem to deal with the situation where my contract was started with my intial only instead of my real name because of some clerical (?) mistake by someone else.   Catch-22.

At the end of my conversation in December, I received two "Identification of Age" eDocuments.  I received two such documents because, over time, my institution migrated to a different set of TIAA funds (this is so complicated, and we can imagine why).  I attempted to "complete" these documents by uploading images of signed copies and my birth certificate to the website.  Those documents have been sitting in the "Information Center" and "Submitted" for review, but it's not clear anything happened as a result.  When I talked to the agent in January, he said they would "look into it."  They may be invalid because of the "initial" problem described above.

During the January conversation, the agent and I really tried hard to get the ultimate annuity authorization form printed out on my computer.  That's the one I sign and send back to them.  Problem was, each time he sent the document to me, the browser simply showed a blank screen after the document was sent to me.  Starting with my default Safari browser, I tried Chrome and Firefox only getting similar results (possibly with some obscure messages).  The agent decided this was possibly because of the problem with my Name being listed as an Initial, and hence said the impossible Name Change form to me.

Now that the phone call is over, it does not appear to be possible to even try to print out that annuity authorization form.  I can't find it anymore on the website, which itself is endlessly complicated, virtually like an Adventure game, where you have to endlessly navigate to find anything useful.

The phone call is similar, they have very complicated phone menus, none of which appear to have anything to do with I want to do, many of which lead to dead ends giving you useless information.

*****

Yesterday I made one phone call to TIAA but after 5 minutes waiting decided to move on to something else.  Every time I call I have to spend about 10 minutes fighting with the phone menu before I finally get myself on a line to talk to a real person.  None of the options at any level of the phone menu seem to apply to what I want, but it's hard to get to a choice where you can choose "other" which ultimately, if you're lucky and choose a good time and have time to wait, you can talk to a live person, which at least seems to make something like progress, even if it's been mostly more and more uncompleted "documents" so far.

Online I found the familiar rut.  One would think that what I want to do (start annunity payments from my two TIAA Traditional accounts) wouldn't be esoteric, but nothing seems to apply.

Anyway, at first considering this an "Action" I go open the Action menu.  This has a few promising looking entries (but none that does anything useful).

The most promising sounding Action item is "Start Loan/Withdrawal."  That brings me to a page showing me only the balance in my variable accounts, which could be withdrawn immediately.  It doesn't say anything about my TIAA Traditional accounts, as if they didn't exist  (the first time I got to this page 3 months ago, I screamed "what happened to all my money!").  It says if I want more information I can call.

So scratch that option.  Like most, it does nothing useful for me now (and I hope I don't have to touch the amounts in my variable accounts for some time...that's my most-long-term quasi-savings account, intended to finance future construction projects--I call it "the Patio Fund").

Tonight, however, I seem to be able to retrace some steps were I thought I was making progress in the past.  If I enter the Resources menu, it has a submenu Transactions and Forms, and I think there is promising stuff in there I will investigate tomorrow.

****

Logging back in to TIAA through Safari, my userid is always misremembered, showing up a 8 asterisks though my actual userid is longer.  I have to start by deleting the asterisks and typing in my actual userid.  If I forget to do that, things could get complicated.  After re-entering my correct userid and password, it doesn't matter whether I check the box to remember my userid or not, the next time Safari will show thost same 8 asterisks again.  Quite possibly the first time I tried to log in to TIAA back in October or so, I first tried an 8 character userid, and Safari or something can't seem to get that out of it's memory cache, no matter how times I check or uncheck the "remember userid" box subsequent to that.

Going through Chrome, it does remember my correct userid (I didn't make a mistake the first time on Chrome as I had for Safari) and even my password, but then has me perform some trick like identify all the stop lights in a picture.  Sometimes these pictures are not very obvious, and I have to go through two or more of them before passing the test.  I'd rather simply type in my password (though it may well be, even if Chrome didn't remember my password, I'd still have to do the "stoplight" test).

*****

Peterson's Second Law

Low probabilities tend towards non-indendence, often just enough to get you into deep trouble.

Stated differently: Variables generally tend towards non-independence.  This means that outliers in one variable tend to be outliers in others.  Likewise, with means.

As a result, the assignment of causality favors the variable estimated with the greatest positive bias.

We see what we want to see, through science or not.

Amazon has bugs too

When I started using Amazon, over 20 years ago, it was like a breath of fresh air.  Finally it seemed I had access to any book title I could think of and could conveniently have it delivered.

Since then, according to many reports, the back end of Amazon has gotten ugly, with fatigued and underpaid workers, cutthroat delivery competition, and community subsidies.

This is not what I wanted.  I wanted endless selection.  I've never really cared about "low prices."  In fact, I don't believe there is such a thing as "low prices."  Low prices are always a come-on that you end up paying for in other ways regardless.  When you pay the "low price" at the retailer, you likely have to pay the healthcare cost of their stressed out employees through taxes, higher insurance cost caused by traffic jams and accidents around the premises, etc.

(On the other hand, there IS such a thing as a "free lunch."  Better goals, methods, and organizations can yield endless free lunches.  Human organization could be far better than it is today.  We already have the technical capacities to build free lunch for everyone all the time, but we choose to build a heavily armed and paranoid hierarchical slum instead.)

Generally the Amazon online shopping experience has been first rate.  On other sites, I've had about a 75% chance of the shopping thing working OK, but it had been close to 100% at Amazon until the last few years, and assisted greatly by Amazon's formerly peerless customer reviews.

No delivery experience has been 100%, and sometimes I've had even worse delivery experiences from Amazon competitors, such as Powell's Books, who you'd think would be better since they do in fact generally charge more.  In my most recent order from Powell's, my book was packed in a thin bag instead of a box and not surprisingly arrived damaged after having been crammed into my mailbox.  IMO, anything larger than a few screws should be packed in an actual box, not a thin bag.  Powell's effortlessly processed the return but gave me no human reply that indicating they could make it better next time.  So--I re-ordered from Amazon, and at least a box was used (without wrapping the book or stuffing padding into it) so it didn't get crushed, just the usual scratches.

Generally, Amazon's delivery has been well below average in quality packaging and getting the goods to me undamaged.  About 75% of the high value books I've ordered from Amazon ended up with a minor scratch or wrinkle because of cheap and fast packing.  I usually try to order off-Amazon when it is fairly easy to do so primarily for this reason (and also because I hate employee crushing monopolies).  For example, my experience in getting well packaged electronics items from Newegg has generally been better than Amazon.  Also better at Music Direct and Audio Advisor.  Since my recent disappointment with Powells, I do not at this time know of a decent online bookseller.  I generally try to order direct from publishing houses when I can, and this usually provides quality delivery, at the highest full retail price too.

But things have been devolving at Amazon and elsewhere, another example of the movie Brazil in real life, in terms of showing advancing technology failing more and more.  With the underlying complexity of recent computer programming methods and systems, it's a wonder anything works at all anymore at all.  Meanwhile, we're told breathless stories about how computing will getting more and more wonderful in the future: impossibly fast, take care of everything, etc.  We'll hardly need to think, or maybe the computers need us at all.  But history tends to repeats itself: they stopped making decent can openers during the Apollo program, and then they cancelled the Apollo program.  I'll start considering celestial predictions when I start seeing pedestrian results continue for more than one step.  But in fact, over time, computerized systems have been getting less and less pedestrian, as complexity exceeds both human and machine grasp, and as goals broaden to include more and more ways of ripping people off.  The essential problem of scaling up parallel processing is that the cost of exchanging information begins to exceed the cost of benefit.  There is a similar problem, even more dramatic, in scaling up complexity, where things can break down entirely.

My most recent experience with Amazon has been especially discouraging, and might lead me to avoid Amazon whenever possible, even if other shopping methods are far less convenient.

I've been trying to Twin XL sheets for my new guest bedroom adjustable bed.  I had figured they might be hard to find in stores and with a limited selection.  (Actually, there were several good choices at Bed Bath & Beyond so I now strongly recommend that brick and mortar store I hope to see a lot more in the future.   I was able to buy just what I wanted at BB&B for $49.99, cheaper than the $69.99 Amazon on the only suitable item I could find there, though the Amazon product had an additional touted benefit.  Recently there had been talk about BB&B folding.  I hope they stay around, especially since Anna's Linens is gone.  I will try to go to BB&B more often now.)

And now that I'm not working outside the home, it's more of a hassle to get shaved and dressed and go out to buy something.  I'd say that adds at least $40 of "personal cost" onto every outside shopping trip.  I'm with those who say the long run impetus is toward electronic purchasing of most everything, everything except those things which require a personal touch such as clothing and produce.  Given ever increasing populations and therefore high desireable population densities, "main streets" generally don't make sense anymore, the transportation cost is much cheaper simply to deliver everything to the customer.  But HOW this major social transformation is worked out is not unimportant.  The Amazon monopoly model is not the best solution for all stakeholders.  And, in addition to that market failure, we have to find more pro-social ways of employing people people displaced from retail into other sectors, such as building green energy systems.

If you know what you are looking for on Amazon, you can often find it, but otherwise not.  If you just start looking for something generic, Amazon will apparently steer you to a certain set of items, and no matter how you navigate from there, you will not get beyond a particular limited horizon and into the famous brands you may only be able to find with a direct search for that brand.  So, the shopping experience is getting dumbed down, just like going into a supermarket where store-brands are continually crowding and often forcing out the brand name items, even if, as on Amazon, the brand name items are actually there, you just cannot find them unless you know the brand name.

I found a few low cost Twin XL sheets, but it took a few hours effort to find something a bit nicer, with claimed US made organic cotton, for example.  I was ultimately able to find something that looked quite nice for $69 and I ordered it.

When the package arrived, it was only Twin, not Twin XL.  I studied the package carefully, and double checked my order.  My order clearly said "Twin XL" but what I received was not.  So I returned the item, using the "wrong item was delivered" option.  (Amazon now has a long preset list of reasons to return an item, each having their own unique "policy.")

However, when the replacement item arrived, once again, it was only Twin, and not Twin XL.

Once again, I took a look at my previous order, now clicking back to the Item page and looking at the dimensions.

Curiously, when I first clicked back to the Item page, it showed the same Dimensions as on my Twin sheets, but it identified it as "Twin XL."  If I then clicked on Twin, and then back on Twin XL, the Dimensions show were the Twin XL dimensions.

So, it looked like the dimensions of your "Twin XL" would depend on the order that you have gone through the size options.  In some cases, those dimensions would be indentical to Twin, and then you would just get Twin like me.

Now I have returned the item under a different policy, "Website Error."  I was hoping that would mean I'd just get a refund.  But it seems to be "processing" my order now.

I may end up having to consider this order a total loss, and that Amazon is not going to send me a Twin XL or give me a cash refund.

It's already cost me more than it was worth in time and agony.

And then there's the bug where reviews for multiple versions of the same Item are all jumbled together, and don't really all apply to the item you may be looking at.