I don’t know much about HTML, Picasa and a lot of web candy I barely care about but I still have some wits and common sense after 29 years of computer use. I know computer purgatory when I see it. Lycos was that and I finally let my account die. Google is purgatory with selection.

Customer service has been next to non-existant for quite a while for nearly everything but You Tube and confused and frustrated bloggers, Picasa users, Google Earth, Usenet posters using the Google portal and groups owners would flood the help forums for Groups with the same trouble over and over or hope for answers to unrelated services.

If you have the same questions repeated endlessly, angry, abusive, childish trolls that wished death on the whole thing, a relative small number of peers trying answer them in earnest yet the search function is so bad that nobody can find previous answers easily and bring on the vicious circle, fatigue and depression over it all.

Google has just two staff members assigned to the forums and they rarely chime in and mostly to post a sticky. The most common troubles were related to owners losing control of their own groups, email lists/adding members in bulk, harassment from members against former members and the largest gripe of all-how can I get all this stuff to work when it won’t (they expect Google to do everything for them, anathema to somebody that started on a TRS-80 Model I and didn’t use a PC until 1986).

Peering this ship meant knowing it would sink or YOU would.

The spam on the Usenet groups cannot be filtered in the way most are accustomed to on the actual newsgroups and with the rapidly decreasing number of ISPs providing it, including one that has been owned by the parent of this blog’s website added to some dicey looking Usenet-only providers, Google Groups looks great until the truth sets in.

Google bought the Deja usenet archives and set up a portal in the hopes of creating a platform to add user-created groups that could be moderated and managed with a minimum of help needed. Users came in droves to get their first taste of a web they could create and learn from (and move to forums outside Google and that seems obvious).

When Google bought so many services that they wanted to make a complete experience at one spot, Groups users found themselves more enthusiastic than Google itself could be. The platform they inherited from Deja hindered things a lot and when the last Beta was made native all hell broke loose. The new Groups never worked well as the Beta and it was loathed! Google did not flinch however and tried to fix it on the fly. The nature of the current platform still does not seem to support adding functionalities and still appears crippled by the usenet section as Google wanted to keep both parts congruous and similar. It was down quite a lot also except for the help forums (separate so trouble could be reported).

I had to deal with people that were trying to manage very large groups–over 10,000 in more than one case, people who could not get their calendars out, organize their church or charity and plenty of manic bouncers that had been on Yahoogroups as well and would never be satisfied because they did not even know what they were using and did not care because Bill Gates said the internet was everything.

The internet isn’t run by Tinkerbell. It’s a router network of insane proportions for data. The young and uninformed know nothing of this and think it’s just an appliance to hook to a computer. I used an HP 3000 mini-mainframe in community college during the mid 80’s, remember how nice Windows 3.11 was and when my Word Perfect no longer was held back by DOS giving me some very creative options with graphios as well as text.

When internet service started up in my area in 1995 14.4 K was it. My friends all wanted to know if they could get PORN on that thing and I shrugged and told them them would be old and dead before it timed out and gave them another 404.

Yes, I have been through a lot of changes online. I still don’t get the impatience and lack of understanding people have with computers and online browsing. They want a television or refrigerator, not a fussy box to constantly set and reset. I’ve never seen it that way although I don’t even care to remember DOS to learn Linux…no thanks!

Knock of early, grab a burger and send us another post. Something about flex work schedules etc. With the increased cost of commuting and the unnavoidable infestation of Gen Y, this topic is getting hot again.

After the EUPHORIC ENRAPTURE”, when we’re reeling in the down spiral, we lament for the “LAST RITES” enabling us to go to “HEAVEN”; knowing full well that all that’s left of the “APPLE” is the “CORE”.

“AND THE BEATING GOES ON AND THE BEATING GOES ON”!!!! Go “CHER”!!!

Advice: Go where you are wanted and you cannot lose. Continously grow your skills. Keep in touch with your old buds and there’s a 50-50 chance you’ll end up colleagues again at a better place.

BTW I am in my upper mid century and it took me until I was 40 to really set myself free. The best bargaining unit is that of FREE WILL.

That aside, we need to start a new country, one without a street called Wall Street. Just working people. We might grow more slowly, but with nobody skimming off the top, we just might, eventually, be loaded. Who’s with me?
– http://www.sawyerspeaks.wordpress.com

Perhaps one of the best pieces you’ve written …

Tim: RE
“That’s why I feel a certain advantage as a member of the younger generation of workers. My peers and I grew up knowing that our jobs are utterly ephemeral and can disappear on a whim.” etc

I once thought as you did. I was the bastard engineer from hell with mad skillz. I was a mercenary. I could go anywhere that paid phat loot.

Then I stuck around at a company I liked for a decade or so. I became “management.” Perhaps I got soft in my old age, but I formed attachments to the people I was in the trenches with.

It was a hard, hard thing to sit across the table from people with 25 years at that company, people who’d been in the workforce when I was but a schoolboy, and tell them that their jobs had been eliminated. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my career.

Someday you may find yourself having to do that too, if you live long enough.

In short, Carl Icahn will win, and everyone else will be left off worse than they started. If you are looking for someone to blame, if you are an employee, shareholder, etc. it is him since he is going to make money in a situation where he has no business. No one should want to be near this deal based upon his history.