Printing at FedEx

I encourage this funny and short read (don't be put off by the rant tag!) I feel we can all relate and should maybe re-evaluate how we serve these end users.

This level of UI frustration reminds me of Halo: Master Chief Collection. It included a remake of Halo 2, and you can play split screen multiplayer like in the original.

In the original Halo 2, to change teams you press x.

In the remake, it's hidden three levels deep in the UI. So you need to open up these nested menus, change your team, then close all the nested menus. If someone fails to close all the menus, no one else can do anything because their controller has sole control of the menu and the screen doesn't show who has the menu open. This would merely be annoying, except that after every game, the teams would be randomized. Not even well randomized, it would typically pit 3 against 1 in a 4 player game. They eventually removed the team randomization, at least.

Also if you wanted name or customize your player, you now need a Microsoft account. Once we spent more than an hour making accounts for everyone and writing them down on a piece of paper, but the next time we played the accounts were all gone. Had probably been auto deleted after more than 6 months. So we would just play as "Whoever", "Whoever Guest 1", "Whoever Guest 2", all green, and have no idea who was who.

IIRC these two features interacted, too, in that you needed to select yourself from a list to change your team. But there was no visual indication of who was who, so you'd have to select each player "Whoever", "Whoever Guest 1", etc. to find the player who's team you were allowed to change, and that would be you.

I recommend trying to print at your local public library instead. They generally do a great job, they usually have a website you can visit and start the print job from home.

When you can't, you can just beg the librarian to do all the hard work for you.

I have a static website with a /print/ URL that's publicly available. Whenever I'm forced to use a public library where I can't pre-stage a print job from home I'll put the file there with a simple name like monday.pdf (since today is monday). Then it's usually quite easy to convince the printer or someone to type in <mydomain>/print/monday.pdf and print it for me.

The only big gotcha is libraries still tend to prefer cash, sometimes their machines take credit, but not always. But at .05 to .10 per page, the junk drawer change is usually plenty.

The last thing I printed was $10 worth of pages, it was a small book. Worked a treat! the librarian did ALL the hard work for me, it was a great experience. Normally for me it's a page or two though every 6 months.

You can't make this stuff up, frustrating yet hilarious. Like why would a machine require a captcha? are they afraid of humanoid robots walking into fedex and printing stuff off?? (and even if they did, any semi modern ai powered robot would blast through any captcha nowadays anyway...) and even if that was the case, I would absolutely want my humanoid robot to go run errands like this for me anyway! robot discrimination!

I squint through 10 rounds of this. Once I’m finished, I’m told one or more of my 10 rounds was incorrect. I’m served up another 10 rounds.

I noticed this the other day trying to get one of my kid’s gaming PC’s logged into Roblox. Ten rounds of CAPTCHA is beyond excessive. In that case, it was a 3D hand pointing and you had to rotate the hand to point in the same direction a bird was facing or something, but it was isometric 3D and there were enough orientation options that even a human with good eyesight probably would get at least one wrong out of ten.

Talk to a human, ask them for cough help. Works 99% of the time (make big watery eyes like a cat and repeat if it did not work the first time). Plus, you get your weekly dose of socialising as an introvert.

As someone mentioned in another post, we should tag these types of posts as "story" or something similar so they can be easily filtered out. This type of writing has its place but it's becoming a way too common post here recently

I email my pdfs to the manager and pick them up when they are ready. No CAPTCHAs!

I remember a point in time, about 2008, when in order to get online or print at a FedEx, you had to plug in a USB cable which would mount a virtual CD on your desktop. You would then install a package from this CD. They had Mac support! However, it was two years into the Intel transition and things hadn’t been updated from PowerPC yet, so you’d have to inspect the contents of the installer package, fish out the appropriate files (which weren’t executables anyway), and then install them manually into the appropriate place in the system. Then you could obtain that sweet, sweet wifi.

Gee I remember the last time I went to FedEx to print smth, the computer access is locked behind the cc pre-auth AND there’s a time limit (~2-5min)!

Who remotely technologically adept even considers to

• log in to their Dropbox on a random machine in a publicly accessible place (when based on the password complexity their Dropbox account is clearly not a junk bin for exactly this purpose)
• try to solve N rounds of captchas (on a likely crappy touchscreen)
• type in a password

???