My struggle with ftp sites
How simple it should have been: Click on the
link, enter the user name and password, log on, download the documents and be
on my way. Easy as pie, right? Nope. The link didn’t work and the web page
didn’t even exist, so I was informed by a chirpy piece of pop up automation software
calling itself Parallels Plesk Panel.
What in creation is Parallels Plesk Panel? It
doesn’t matter. It isn't there to help. Its sole purpose is to remind me that
I’ve been kneecapped, again, in a world created by programmers who regularly
fail to understand the needs of computer users.
Today’s hi-tech disappointment occurred
while trying to log onto an ftp site. For those who have never had the
pleasure, ftp sites (File Transfer Protocol, for what that’s worth to know,
although Fekkin’ Total Pain is more descriptive) are handy dandy places where
companies store big images and fat documents too large to email.
I generally use ftp sites to download high-resolution
images directly into my computer. Some magazines have ftp sites, so if my
images are too big to get past their email firewalls, I can upload them onto their
ftp sites for my editors to retrieve.
When ftp sites work, they are a simple drag
and drop experience. But often they are just a drag.
Here is a typical ftp epic: I can’t log on.
I give up, exasperated. I contact my editor. He can’t help. He drags his IT
dude into the repair vortex. We write, exchange, forward and cc emails,
sometimes over several days. Solutions are cast on the water. Outdated
instructions and passwords are withdrawn. I receive new, multi-page
instructions for analysis. Someone, hackles up and empathy on standby, suggests
I install a different browser (some ftp sites work with Explorer, but refuse to
go on Safari) or maybe download Cyberduck, software to help you quack into ftp
sites.
Is there anything else you would like me to
do, oh Silicon Idol?
The earth, in its glory, rotates around the
sun while we grub around with a nasty little tool that should have been wadded
up, used once and flushed before it ever got off the drawing board.
Guitar virtuso Jimi Hendrix, so goes the
story, would listen to his songs over the radio in the parking lot before he would
declare a studio session a success. In computer lingo, he beta-tested his work
to make sure his fans could hear what he wanted them to hear.
In computer land, the user is beta-tester and unwilling technician, rolled into a fetal ball. It’s 2013 and we’re where
automobile owners were in the nineteen-teens, lying in the mud, blinking up at
the oil dripping down. We are computer age analogues of the forsaken Joads
family in The Grapes of Wrath, rebuilding their engine in a ditch.
It is a fact that computers are more
unavoidable than death as a freelancing tool. It would be impossible to work at
a pace rapid enough to hit my deadlines without them. But after yet another ftp
mud wrassle I sigh and think of the sign tacked up inside the outhouse, lit through
the quarter-moon sawn in the door: “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.”
-30-
Copyright © Carroll McCormick
2013
No comments:
Post a Comment