#user hostile

Somewhere in that nest of snakes and spaghetti at the heart of your backend is a variable I have failed to set, and posts showing up in tags is still a boolean away.  

OMG rant below. Be warned.

I took it OUT of Full Auto Mode the first time I ran it.

Then I had to log out of Windows and back in because Windows, in all its glory, just HAS to tell me all about how it installed updates that I don't care about and already knew it had installed, like a small child who doesn't get enough attention. Doing so unhides my auto-hide taskbar, which means it pretty much takes over the context and covers over buttons that I want to access. Either I have to wait for it to stop whining and go away, which could take hours -- Windows is very persistent about leaving up these notices no matter how unimportant until you acknowledge them -- or click the little X to close it. Or I can click anywhere else on the message to bring up Windows Update which will cost MORE time and annoyance. So I clicked the little X and then Windows did the OTHER thing it is good for -- it LOCKED THE TASK BAR OPEN. Now it will not hide no matter what I do, short of logging out or rebooting. Believe me, I've looked. Apparently this is another big "Fuck you, we don't care, we don't have to" from Microsoft that they will never even think about fixing. "What, you wanted that feature to WORK? Hah hah! You're lucky we don't sue you for buying our software!"

OK, so meantime I had taken the scanner software out of Full Auto Mode. Why would I want Full Auto Mode on scanner software? It never uses the settings I want. Of course I forgot the First Rule of Writing Software for Useful Products: Fuck the Customer. When I ran the scanner software again it was in Full Auto Mode.

This is of course what I always expect software to do -- ignore what I set and choose its own settings. Naturally the people who wrote the software are smarter than you and not only know what you REALLY want to do, despite that you may think otherwise, but they actually know what you want to do years before you want to do it. It's fucking amazing they haven't taken over the fucking world with their fucking telepathic precognition. But then again, they're competing with Microsoft's fucking telepathic precognition, so maybe that's why.

Guess what Full Auto Mode does? Well, it certainly doesn't interact with you. The pull-down menu that would let you take it out of Full Auto Mode doesn't work, because -- you know -- Full Auto Mode.

Halfway through the scan I hit Cancel. Do you know what Cancel does in Full Auto Mode? It closes the program.

So I ran the program again. Of course it's in Full Auto Mode, so it completed the scan, saved it to disc, and opened Windows Exploder on the file. Nice. It's a JPEG which of course I don't want, so I deleted it and closed the Explorer window. No scanner window, but it's on the task bar, so I click it... and 2 seconds later it closes.

Huh. Next time I let it scan, same thing, but this time I clicked on the task bar immediately; the only difference was that the program closed before I deleted the file I didn't want in the directory I didn't choose in the format that's useless to me.

So let me get this straight -- there's no way to prevent it from going into Full Auto Mode, once it's in Full Auto Mode there's no way to take it out again, and Full Auto Mode is fucking useless? And this is in the name of convenience and ease of use. Well fuck me.

It's no wonder my life sucks.

Epilog:

1) Apparently what you have to do to change the setting is click on Pause, though if you do so immediately nothing happens (I also love buttons and controls that show up but don't work, aren't greyed out, and so on...). It's not obvious that "Pause" cancels the scan and puts you into the main window, rather than just delaying the scan until you hit some kind of "Continue" button, nor that "Cancel" (same button, but later in the process) doesn't cancel the scan, but shuts down the program. Let's hear it for user-hostile interfaces and the Principle of Greatest Astonishment.

2) I don't know if it's because I created and saved a profile or if it's just because I exited the program using the "Close" button, but now it's staying in Professional Mode. Note that while I can understand why it would not save the current settings during a clean Windows shutdown, what I don't understand is why it would save SOME settings (the "don't show this useless window at startup") but not OTHER settings (the "Use Professional Mode instead of Full Auto Mode").

There's also Home Mode and Business Mode. I presume "Home Mode" is "You're too stupid to understand anything so we're going to give you one button to push and hope we don't get a 99% customer service call rate from users who are too stupid to figure out how to push one button", and "Business Mode" is "you're still too stupid, but you want to look smart to your collegues." Professional Mode doubtless means "We don't have any higher opinion of you than the home or business users but since you think you're smarter than a turnip we gave you a setting to try out until your brain hurts and you just give up and set it back to Home Mode anyway."

This is some new height in user hostile design. In Paypal checkout forms, you can no longer checkout without logging in if your email OR your credit card is associated with a Paypal account.

Problem: My paypal account is Canadian, and uses a Canadian credit card that no longer exists. American credit cards cannot be added to a Canadian account.

For posterity, and anyone who wants to figure out how to change the country your Paypal account is associated with. Short answer is, you cannot. You have to close your account and reopen it. I found out in a very unpleasant way today.

Here's what I wrote to them in their "feedback form":

Do your customers never move from one country to another? Or do customers not ever have credit cards from two different countries? I just want to be a Canadian who pays with an American credit card! For that matter. Why can't I checkout without logging in? You require email on your checkout form, and then when I provide the email, you don't let me checkout because I have an account. My account is in Canada, and linked to a Canadian credit card that no longer exists, to which I cannot add an American credit card. So now I'm closing this account in order to reopen it, and I am losing $10 in the process. Your checkout form is user hostile.

When you're a payment gateway, giving users no way around you is one way to increase your conversion rate. It is also a way of making your users very angry. I am now motivated to actively root for Stripe, Square, and the like.

On second thought, I am not going to reopen my Paypal account.

At least they donate the $10 I'm abandoning in my account to an unspecified charity. Ugh.