Into the ozone

—1) I have instituted e-mail billing with our electric utility: National Grid.
They send me an e-mail notification my monthly electric-bill is available for viewing. Give ‘em a break. They avoid postage and printing costs; my paper is used to print the bill.
I instituted this three months ago, and every month since has been an incredible hairball.
The other night I gave up. Viewing the bill was impossible.
We got a “contact-us” e-mail link, and I sent the following e-mail:
“Your e-mail gives me an amount and due-date, so I will authorize a bill-pay from my bank.
But I have yet to view the bill!
I found the ‘view-bill’ link, but it wants me to log in.
Snail-mail billing doesn’t require that.
Logging in bombed, of course; and it wanted me to set up a ‘user-profile.’
WHAT? All I wanna do is pay the bill.
Snail-mail never wanted a user-profile.
I tried setting that up at least four times, and it bombed every time.
E-mail billing takes me way too long.
Spare us the instructions on logging-in, or setting up a user-profile.
Take us back to snail-mail billing.
Paying the snail-mail bill takes me 5-10 minutes; e-mail billing blows about two hours.
I can’t afford that.”
Whaddya wanna bet I get a response telling me how to log-in, and/or set up a user-profile.
Again: “Spare us the instructions on logging-in, or setting up a user-profile.
Take us back to snail-mail billing.”
In other words, I’ve already tried setting up a user-profile, and every time it bombs.
None of this insanity accompanied my snail-mail bill.
—2) Our cleaning-lady was done the other day (Thursday, March 29, 2012), and about to leave.
20 smackaroos, which we didn’t have, so we had to write a check.
“Hand-write the check or your new Quicken?” my wife asked.
“I could try,” I answered.
My wife explained our new Quicken is throwing hairballs.
I fired up my new Quicken. —My old Quicken no longer prints checks. Long story.
“Write check,” I click on the menu-bar.
There’s the “write-check” dialog window.
I entered our cleaning-lady’s name, and the $20.
So far, so good.
But I forgot to enter the date, so the check was on the register at the wrong location with the wrong date (March 29).
So, “edit check.”
I changed the date, but what’s this?
My Social-Security deposit has become 3/29 instead of 3/13 (the date it was posted).
“Oh well, I can fix that later,” I thought.
Another try at editing our cleaning-lady’s check.
This time an uncleared gift-check written last Christmas jumped into the register four times, madly deducting its amount each time.
“I give up,” I shouted. “Hand-write the check!”
I now had to correct my Quicken register; make it agree with reality.
I deleted the extra Christmas checks, and corrected the erroneous transaction-date on my Social-Security electronic-fund-transfer.
Doing so burned up at least an hour of frenzied trial-and-error.
Strange unknowable anomalies were taking over and throwing things into the ozone.
By then our cleaning-lady was long gone with a hand-written check.
This stuff is “user-friendly?” Why does it take a computer techno-maven to do anything?
My old Quicken, and our snail-mail electric-bill, were “user-friendly.”

• “Snail-mail” is of course the U.S. Postal Service.