I have a Google account. I use Gmail. I do a lot of my writing on Google Docs. It’s a great tool. Most of this blog is first written on a Google Doc. It’s easy. It’s simple. I’m checking my email anyway, so I start up some writing. I can bring up the same writing on my desktop and on my laptop. Awesome! It’s great, it works well.
But here’s the thing. Here’s the thing. The thing is that the Google account that I use for this blog is not my main, personal email account that I use or everything else. It’s just for this. And that’s fine. It works out well. I have my normal email logged in as default on my chrome browser. Then if I want to do some writing, I’ll log onto this email in an incognito tab. It works out very well, and I like it. So far so good.
The problem arises when I take my laptop to another location that has internet like, say, a library. A common place for people to go to use the internet. It’s a decent place for writing since you’ve got all these books around to inspire you, and there aren’t as many distractions as at home, like the TV and gaming console and all that neat stuff. So I go to the library, bring up my computer, type in my username, type in my password, hit the enter key, and Google tells me, “Verify it’s you.” Like, that’s what the fucking password was for! I gave you the password! It’s me. It’s literally me just sitting there, looking at a screen with an annoyed expression on my face. It’s me. Is it so shocking to Google that people bring their laptops to different places and use different sources of internet?
That first time, I just went home. I was pissed off. The next time I was planning to go to the library, I took a moment, at home, to log into my writing account. That way it’s already logged in by the time I get to the library. It worked fine. And since I worked on that account at the library, I thought that Google would “know” that my account and that wi-fi were friends. But no. It didn’t. I still had to do the same trick again.
Imagine this at any other time. Go back to the Prohibition era. You become friends with a guy who works at a speakeasy. He tells you, “Here’s the address, knock on the door, and say this password and we’ll you in.” So you go there, you knock on the door, you say the password, and the guy’s like, “Okay, now give me your telephone number, I need to call you to make sure it’s you. So go home and go to your telephone, and I’ll call you.” You’d tell him to go fuck himself.
That could be a good comedy skit.
Anyway, Google does this shit and I guess they want it to be extra, extra secure, but in practice it just makes it annoying for people. Why am I being subjected to this? And I get it, I’m using Google. It has great features. This shit just sucks ass, plain and simple. I wish I could just opt out and say, I’m fine with just having the password, I don’t have super secret stuff on there, it’s just an account I made for writing, I don’t need ultra maximum security where I can’t fucking log in.
The other thing is, I could just put in my personal phone number, and log on. I don’t really want my phone number attached to every fucking thing I do. Kind of a pointless thing, and it makes me feel like I’m being punished for doing nothing wrong.
I remember Apple, back in the day, would punish me for doing nothing wrong as well. The iPod was a pretty big deal, and you’d plug it into your computer to put songs on it. You could manage your iPod’s library and your computer’s iTunes library. But they had this thing where the iTunes account was only allowed to be “friends with” five iPod devices. Okay, but we’re a family! We have a family computer, as people did in the early-to-mid-2000’s. Maybe they still do, I don’t fucking know. But my dad was nice enough to buy an iPod for my mom, then he got one, then we all got one. But we were fucked cause we couldn’t use them all on the iTunes account. What a sick joke, and it’s the same thing, we were being punished for doing nothing wrong. We weren’t trying to steal or pirate anything. We were just trying to hang out and use iTunes. Sometimes these tech companies are assholes.
Lefty Forrester 