Admin work for business owners has changed quite a bit over the past 20 years; things have crept up on us and all I seem to be doing now is running from desptop to laptop and/or mobile. However the most annoying task I find myself having to do is the continual financial validations!
I’d love to know whether all the additional hoops we have to jump through now have made any significant decrease in online fraud. With my cynic’s hat on, I can imagine that if it’s saving each organisation one job, it’s a good enough reaason to make all of us carry on double authenticating.
Today’s examples include
- eMail : despite the fact that I have had the same desktop for the past 3 years, my email does not recognise the device and needs me to double verify I am who I am claiming to be.
Cue to choose from receiving a text, WhatsApp or enter the details of my back up email account so they can send me a verification code. I elect not to go the email route in case logging into this email will cause another request for identity confirmation, so I go for the lesser of three evils: the WhatsApp code. (The signal is notoriously bad in the house so I really don’t want to be running outside to get the code). - Paypal: Decided it had been a really long time since I last logged in (yesterday) and decided it wanted a verification code not once, but twice, albeit from a different laptop the second time (but same IP address). It’s almost like they want you to close your account and go elsewhere…
- Additionally, Paypal has changed its layouts which has been annoying for anyone who only needs to use the odd query or request a partial refund from time to time… and as usual, the help file misses a vital piece of information, so after clicking on “Activity” where do I go next?
- And to cap it all, when you do an online shop from Morries and click on the payment button, it goes to a screen asking you if you really meant to be paying for something. Yes, give me another button to click won’t you….
However this week’s most annoying job has been having to reconstruct my laptop which was brand ew two years ago. Since then it’s been like the 12 days of Christmas:
On the 1st anniversary of my purchase, my Lenovo stopped the internal camera from working.
Easy Fix: buy an external camera and use that instead.
On the second anniversary of my purchase, my Lenovo would not boot.
This time, the fix was doable for me, with help from an online video as to how to access the fix menu. I went through various permutations, but in the end, the only solution was to do a complete reset which was time consuming. However this is not something that a novice would be confident to do.
I get the feeling that my laptop is set to glitch when I refuse to purchase the annual subscription to a specific software suite and warranty care.
Thank goodness for GMail; I’ll need some time to get used to Google Docs, but it seems to have all the things I need, so it’s just a question of getting used to where the functions are.
And the best part is that not spending money on the annual care and software licences for 2 years means I have more than paid for the new laptop which I am currently using which was a complete bargain at £229 and gives me an additional 8GB of RAM which make a noticeable difference!
