Really?

‘This is actually crazy’: Callers to Washington hotline shocked when pressing 2 for Spanish

I have been concerned for a while that our technology has outgrown our ability to manage it.  I don’t mean large scale, although recent outages are somewhat shocking.  I’m talking about small scale things.  I may or may not be having (mesh) router problems.  But let’s not go there, for now.

Last night I had a simpler one.  Booked a flight and got the usual email from the airline.  Usually it automatically takes the Gmail message and adds the flight info to my Google calendar. Not this time.  Into the black hole of Reddit I dove.  It was comforting to see so many other people with the same problem, but distressing to see it goes back years with little or no obvious fixes.

I’m guessing my problem is new “AI” management of these sorts of things, since it just started.  I tried various settings in email and in the calendar app, resent the mail to myself.  Sent a text.  Tried the airline app.  There were supposed to be buttons to add the flight to my calendar in all of these places, but I couldn’t find a one.

In the end I went to the airline web site and found the ICS file for my flight on the web page.  ICS is the old iCalendar text format from 1998 that is still, successfully it seems, in use today.  Clicked on it and BOOM! the flight was on my calendar.

Sometimes I miss the 1990s.