Wasting time because someone else updated

OK, I'll admit that this is a rant. But, after all if I can't rant here, where can I blow off steam? I've been wasting time on a couple of fronts yesterday and today just because someone, somewhere updated something and now what worked on my computer yesterday doesn't work today. What a waste of time.

Yesterday I struggled for hours because my FTP program stopped working. It has worked flawlessly for 4 years as a means to get files up to my Internet host. Yesterday it wouldn't work. And do you think that I could get any help from "Technical Support" at my hosting site - Lowesthosting.com? No! They just blamed it on me or something at my end. After several hours of back and forth with them and with them telling me all was well on their end, I tried a change on my end. Mind you this was something that had worked "as is" for 4 years. All of a sudden things worked again! And the clowns on the other end still wouldn't admit that they had anything to do with anything. This certainly appears to be a case where their end had gone for years not checking a particular parameter setting from my end and then (likely due to some version change or maintenance update at their end) they started checking this parameter and blocked things from my end. Stuff like that happens all the time. I just wish that everyone in the loop would take responsibility for actions that they take that result in unintended consequences. I've certainly fallen on my sword a number of times with tech support people when I've discovered that some problem that I was having was something that I had caused. I called it pilot error, which is the number one reason that planes fly into the ground or that computers crash. The techs at Lowesthosting just congratulated me for fixing the problem on my end. No admission that maybe something changed there and no concern (seemingly) that others may also be affected by whatever they did.

Today it was Microsoft's turn to give me fits (Not and unusual scenario for those who have owned a PC for any length of time). Both the Microsoft XP operating system and Internet Explorer occasionally update themselves and the results are often that things don't work afterwards. Today IE somehow decided that it no longer liked Javascript (not unusual given the history between Microsoft and SUN) and that it no longer wanted to accept cookies. It took a while to get that mess straightened out so that I could even sign on here today. But does Microsoft care. Not at all. After all, they would opine, if I weren't such a dumbie I'd have upgraded to Vista by now. Yeah, right! The way real estate is selling right now I'm lucky to even be on XP.

So, there. I feel much better. I'm still not happy about the wasted time, but getting that out, with raspberries to the offenders (at least as I believe them to be). I'll get back to more real estate-y things tomorrow.