Overseas Tech Hell

I've just gotten back from Sicily. I was there for over a month. Travel there was made much easier by the travel company we used called The Good Life Abroad. I highly recommend it. 

Sicily was a truly magical place. I'm guessing that much of what you've heard about it is not true but, more on that later. You know what would have made my trip even more magical? Trouble free technology. 

Alas, that was not to be. Every bit of tech that I brought along to make it easier to operate in Italy was harder than anticipated and more difficult than it needed to be. We can communicate across the globe and run AI that streamlines our work and still, it kind of sucks. 

Here are the six layers of Tech Hell that made my trip more of a trial than it should be. After this trip, I yearned for the days when we could only write letters, used paper maps, and had no further expectations.

eSIM Hell

In the absence of WIFI, it used to be that your choice was to either forgo use of your smart phone or pay stupid amounts of money to have your mobile carrier provide you with an international plan. New phones, however, come equipped with the ability to have a virtual SIM, a.k.a an eSIM, stand in for your phone's hard SIM. With your eSIM in place you can, theoretically, connect to the local telephone network to get roaming data. I opted for an eSIM from Truely because it came recommended by my travel company.

The first problem was in the implementation. Even though our phones were listed as compatible, the automated setup failed on both of them. I dutifully followed their instructions for a manual mounting of the eSIM, which required more knowledge of your phone's settings than most people have. When I got to Italy, it didn't work. After some time on WiFi in a hotel lobby, tech support walked me through manual setup of an access point. If I weren't a computer geek, I would have been completely intimidated and befuddled. It should not have been this difficult for two different phones. 

When I used their app to add data to one of our plans, it didn't exactly work the way you think. It seems logical to assume that more data would appear on your current plan, but nope! Instead, you get another plan which will only activate when your old plan runs out. It would be nice to know that upfront. 

Oh, and performance sucked. I simply cannot recommend Truely for your eSims. When I travel overseas again, I will try a different company, if only to see if it was Truely or all eSims that are terrible.

Verizon and 2FA Hell

I decided that I would go ahead and check something in my Verizon account. I wanted to be sure they weren't charging me for an international plan I didn't order. Seems easy enough. Sign into my Verizon account from my laptop. HAHAHAHAHA! No. We have to deal with two factor authentication (2FA) because it's safer. They insist on sending you a text message to do the 2FA. My phone is not on their network and text and phone calls do not work with my eSIM. I can't get the authentication code. Now, you think someone would have thought of this already. Perhaps some enterprising Verizon product manager might have mused "What happens if someone's phone isn't working and they want to sign into their account, perhaps to buy a new phone?" Nope. There's a lot of nopes in this story. I get on their customer service chat and say " I can't sign into my account because I can't get text messages. The stupid bot tells me that I have to sign in before it can't help me or connect me to a human. I tell it that I can't sign in because I can't receive text messages. It gives me all kinds of ways to sign in when you have problems signing in EXCEPT for when I can't receive a text message. Gah! The stupid! It burns! They have my email - why can't they use that? This reliance on one type of authentication with no work around is just inexcusable stupid process design. 

ProtonVPN Hell

I thought to myself "What if I need to connect to something back in the USA that doesn't want to connect to an overseas computer? Get a VPN! I respect Proton and like their other products, so this seemed obvious. It is true that they give you a safer way to connect to things. The problem is that it is too safe. Countless websites just won't work because the VPN hides too much.

Let's be honest, one of the main reasons to use a VPN is to access content from back in your home country that you are already paying for. It's not like they give me a break on my subscription payments because I'm out of the country. The VPN is supposed to cure that problem. Supposed to...

Instead, ProtonVPN blocked so much information that streaming services either were wonky or didn't work at all. A great example of this is MLB TV. If I was connected to any country, including my home country, using the VPN, MLB TV wouldn't show me the list of games available. Strangely, it had no problem with the list of games if I wasn't connected to the VPN at all. The content, however, wouldn't play unless I was connected to the VPN. I had to choose a game from the list without the VPN connection and then connect using the VPN to actually watch a game. This sort of thing happened a lot. In most cases websites would just generate a variety of errors. 

Simply put, it may be safer, but it doesn't work. That's not a good tradeoff.

WhatsApp Hell

Much of Europe and Africa is really big on WhatsApp, the communication application from Meta. Like it's sibling, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp allows you to text, make calls, and video conference. Unlike Messenger, WhatsApp uses your phone number as your chief identifier. Your phone number is just an ID and has no other connection to your phone. That doesn't mean it doesn't want to connect to everything on your phone. See, WhatsApp tries to ingest all of your phone numbers from your smartphone contacts list by default. This is ostensively to find other WhatsApp users that you know. The TOS, however, doesn't really say what else they might do with all that identifying information or how they store it. Kind of not the best thing from a security point of view. This is especially so since Meta is known to just handover identifying information to (at least) the United States government without a warrant. 

You can opt out from allowing them to ingest all of your phone numbers but, it becomes much harder to use after that. WhatsApp also constantly nags you to allow it to go ahead and slurp up your contact list. It's unrelenting in its quest for your information. Like too many tech bros, WhatsApp doesn't like to take No for an answer.

It also wants all kind of permissions to access your device, some of which don't seem to have anything to do with communication. You can opt out of some of these blanket permissions but then some features don't work. For example, rather than give WhatsApp permission to always access my phone's microphone, I changed it to ask each time. Subsequently, when someone tries to call me on WhatsApp, I get the standard Android permissions popup asking if I want to allow it all the time, never, or just this time. If I choose "just this time" the call immediately drops. WhatsApp also insisted on having access to my Phone app so that it wouldn't "intrerfere with incoming calls." Facebook Messager doesn't need to access my Phone app to function well, so it doesn't make sense that WatsApp needs this type of permission.

Somehow this seems more sinister than just bad UX. From the moment of installation, WhatsApp seems to want to own my phone. If you don't understand how cell phone permissions work, it's too easy to just accept Meta's attempt to access your information for whatever they want.

Google (and Apple) Maps Hell

I'm the first to admit that online maps have changed everything about how we navigate. Want to find out how to get to your friends' new house? Google/Apple Maps. Need to figure out what bus to take to get somewhere in a city? Google/Apple Maps. The days of paper maps and real land navigation are pretty much gone.

For that reason, it is very important that these mapping services perform well, if not flawlessly. The problem is, they don't. 

I spent much of my time in Palermo. It's a major city with a metro area of roughly 1.3M people. To put that in perspective, it's about twice the size of Boston, MA. You would think that Google Maps would have a pretty good picture of the city. If you thought that you'd be wrong. I can't tell you how many blind alleys Google Maps sent us down. If you think their locations services are any better, you'd also be wrong. At one point, Google Maps thought I was in two locations simultaneously. That would be a neat trick if it were true but, it would also break the Space Time Continuum. Space Time is safe for now. 

One of the biggest problems I encountered with Google Maps was the way it optimizes routes. Those optimizations seem to be based on either time or distance but never degree of difficulty. In old parts of ancient cities such as Palermo, Google Maps is happy to have you drive down a street so narrow that a car can barely make it without scraping the walls. Worse yet, it's happy to send people walking down those streets so that you can be pushed up against a wall for dear life. It's great in an American suburb but, not so much in an old city.

Folks I knew using Apple Maps had similar experiences you iPhone people shouldn't get snotty here.

The Internet Disinformation Hell

Before going to Sicily, I did some "research" on the Internet as to Sicilian customs, dress, and other clues to living like a local, albeit for a month. According to the Internet, everyone dressed better than Americans, everything closed between noon and 4pm, trains were unreliable, no one spoke English, and car drivers were more than happy to turn you into roadkill. I read dozens of travel articles obviously written by people who had never been to Sicily. 

Palermo is a major cosmopolitan center. There are people living here from Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia. Tamil is a major language spoken here. Most people in service jobs had at least a smattering of English, many spoke much better English than I could speak Italian or Sicilian. There are lots of ex-patriate British and Americans as well. With a little help from Google Translate, we had no problem getting around.

Shops and restaurants were open all day and everyone dressed like they were in Southern California with t-shirts, jeans, and sneakers the norm. There were a lot of Yankees baseball caps. Lots. Given that my heritage is Southern Italian, most Sicilians assumed I was at least Italian... until I opened my mouth.

Driving is a challenge with few traffic lights and multi-lane road often don't have lane markers. That said, drivers stop for pedestrians. You walk out into a crosswalk and traffic stops for you. Expect for those guys on scooters. They're just jerks.

The point is everything you hear on the Internet about Palermo is wrong. Not a little wrong but vastly wrong. The contrast between what is on the Internet and what is on the ground just accentuates the failure of the Internet as an information source. You can trust some curated sites that have controls and major news sites operated by real journalists but, everything else is highly suspicious at best.

Conclusion

Sicily was amazing. The people were friendly and helpful. Food and wine are incredible and inexpensive. Getting around is much easier than in many American cities. Oh, and the trains run on time and there are lots of them to all major locations. In that regard, Sicily outpaces the United States by a lot.

Good old fashioned American championed information technology was difficult to use, inaccurate, and downright frustrating. Many of the promises that information technology make are hollow and not to be trusted. 

After 40 years in the industry, what saddens me the most is how sloppy it is. Simple things such as a button adding time to a data plan actually doing something entirely different add stress and irritation especially when you are in an unfamiliar place. Security systems that keep you safe by locking you out of resources you need is just bad implementation. No access is not the same as safe access. Bad information is worse than no information.

At the end of the day, all the money spent on technology should have guaranteed that it at least be "good" by now. It hasn't and that's a major business fail.