How much corporate nonsense can I take in a day?

I received an email about a sale of Adobe Photoshop Elements 12.  Since my old Elements expired long ago, I decided to give it a go.  I clicked on the button in the message and a webpage opened with an ad for Elements 12.  It required me to sign in before continuing.

When I did so, it said that I needed to use a new password.  They would email me a temp password.  That came in a short time.  I used the temp password and created a new password.  That verification came in a short time.

Finally, I could order Elements 12 and I did.  I went to my cart and was ready to whip out my credit card.  Fortunately, I read the details of the order before I checked out.  It was for a Windows version!!!  No matter what I looked under, I could never get a Mac version.

I was going to give up, but somehow I clicked on Chat Now!  I explained my problem to 'Selena' and after a few minutes, she gave me a link to the Mac version of Elements 12.  Then I looked at the download times and decided to pass.  Besides, the time for this simple chat was almost ten minutes!  Total time trying to order must have been over 30 minutes!

I have been slowing moving my email from one provider to another.  Sometimes we can tell an organization our new email and it is changed in minutes.  Some organizations say it will be updated in 10 days.  Sometimes we tell an organization and our email is only updated for one department; email from other departments goes to the old email address.

And sometimes we get a doozy of a notice:

"Your primary e-mail address has been updated.  Please note that if you deleted your e-mail address, you are no longer eligible to suppress your account statements…"

"Suppress" our account statements?  What country was this task outsourced to?  Didn't they mean "access".  And why so wordy? 

I have a Monster iCarPlay FM transmitter that I use to play podcasts in the car.  Somehow the tuning goes out of whack and I have difficulty finding a unused frequency.  I know I have the instructions buried somewhere, but I could not find them in the car.

I went to the monster.com to look for the instructions, but all I found was a flyer (called instructions or directions).  It described what one could do but not how to do it.

With a few more searches, I found the PDF of exactly just the piece of paper I can't find.  But it was not at monster.com!  I put those directions on my iPhone and will use them next time I want to drive and listen to a podcast.

I think I dealt with  a couple of other websites or programs that did not operate as one would expect, but it has been such a hectic day, I can't remember what they were.  Oh, yeah!  Blogger "crashed" on me while I was posting a blog entry.  At least, it didn't lose any of my text.

What is slower than the Postal Service?

Electronic fund transfers!  From one corporation to another!  In days, not hours!

On Tuesday I asked online for the cash balance of my brokerage account and the sales of some mutual fund shares, the proceeds of each to be transferred to my local checking account.  Neither transaction was confirmed until Wednesday afternoon.  My bank account did not show the deposits until eight o'clock Thursday.  About 46 hours after I had made my request, I saw the result.

Two days is what it takes to send in one Netflix DVD and receive the next!  In fact, the time from pickup to confirmation is less than 16 hours.  I am notified of the shipment of the next DVD about noon and receive it before 10 the next morning.  Hm!  With a 12:30 pickup and a 10:00 delivery, that's less than 46 hours!  A two-way transaction is faster than a one-way transaction!

The first is done completely by computers.  The second is done by a lot of hard-working people, both government and corporate.

Oh, yes, the last two DVDs have been from southwestern Wisconsin, not from Duluth.  Unbelievable, a Postal Service truck is faster than corporate computers!

Lack of transparency of corporate political donations

A mutual fund recently asked its clients to petition the Securities and Exchange Commission for transparency in political contributions.  The fund included a website to do so.  The suggested message was long-winded and so I wrote my own very brief statement:

If corporations do not have the right to vote, then why do they have the right to contribute to political campaigns?

If corporations claim it is their right in a democracy, then why do they only present a single slate of candidates for their boards, pre-selected by who else but the current board?

If you haven't received a similar request through a mutual fund, you can send your own comment to chairmanoffice@sec.gov.