Bad Apple: iPhone 7

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published March 29, 2017] ©2017

 

I know some people who can’t wait to upgrade their cell phones when a new model comes out. Personally, I’d rather eat my own organs.  

 

Anyone who has read my column for a while knows that I have a hate-hate relationship with technology. My antediluvian view is that it should make people’s lives easier rather than utterly suck the life and the will to live out of people.

 

A case in point: I’d only had my iPhone 6 for 18 months when it stopped charging. After endless wasted hours trying to troubleshoot it on the Internet, the cell phone store guy diagnosed it within two minutes.  “The port’s gone bad,” he said, demonstrating.  “You can send it to Apple and have it fixed for $199. Or you can upgrade to the new iPhone 7 today for $70.”

 

He was genuinely surprised at my lack of enthusiasm.  “Nothing ever works the same,” I groused.

 

“Oh,” he insists. “You won’t notice the difference.”

 

Come back, iPhone 6 with the bad port. I should have just fixed you. Unfortunately, to get the “deal” on the iPhone 7, they make you turn in your old phone where it will be “refurbished” and inflicted on some other hapless iPhone customer where it will never work right again.

 

Technology has simply run amok. The Apple people just keep adding stupid features which for reasons known best to them they think people actually want. 

 

One of the first aggravations I had with this phone is that the when I turned off the screen to save the battery it would come right back on when I was carrying it in the upright cell phone pocket of my purse.  It was sucking the heck out of the battery.  After more fruitless on-line research, I ended up back at the cell phone store.

 

“Oh,” says the sales kid-du-jour, “It’s a new factory set feature on the iPhone 7 called ‘raise to wake.’  Every time you put the phone in a vertical position, the screen automatically comes on.”  He adds, seeing my grumpy face, “A lot of people really like it.”

 

WHO??? More to the point, WHY?????

 

To me, it would seem that if you wanted this idiotic feature, you could activate it instead of torturing techno-morons like me who would not have figured this out in ten zillion billion years. He disabled it for me.

 

Now another feature I liked about my previous iPhones that the malevolent spawns-of-satan at Apple have done away with is the headphone jack. If you want to plug in a headset now, you have to use a cheap junky worthless adaptor that comes with your new iPhone which plugs into the charging port.  This, of course, means that you can’t charge your phone while you’re using a headset or do myriad other functions which I don’t do anyway but if I did, I’d be seriously annoyed.

 

Plugging my former ear buds into the adaptor and then into the phone, there was a steady clicking noise and a lot of static. The sound cut in and out.

 

It didn’t take me long to find out on Google that many other iPhone 7 customers had the same unhappy experience.

 

Personally, I don’t think Apple ever cared whether the adaptor worked or not.  They want you to buy Bluetooth stuff.  But the idea of having yet another gadget that has to be charged irritates me beyond belief.  I just want low-tech ear buds so I can listen to music or meditation programs on my phone. I am trying to learn to be a calm person.

 

It is not surprising that there are dozens of links for “Solutions to iPhone 7 lacking a headphone jack” on the Internet.  It would not surprise you to know that virtually none of them are cheap. The Audeze Lightning Headphones are a mere $800.

 

I should mention that along with the crappy useless adaptor, the phone came with a set of ear buds that can be plugged directly into the charging port but were clearly designed for persons with mutantly-large ear canals.  No hope I could get them into my little ears. 

 

The Apple non-support guy was unapologetic and more to the point, vastly unhelpful. He recommended “going to the Apple on-line store and picking out some new head phones.”  So I was right all along!  Meanwhile, both Apple and non-Apple vendors have jumped in with products that will fix a problem that should never have been created in the first place.

 

I could feel my blood pressure soaring.  When I hung up with Apple, Olof listened to me rant for 10 minutes.

 

“What are you trying to listen to?” he inquired.

 

 “My ‘Overcoming Stress’ program,” I said. “HOW DO THEY EXPECT ME TO FIND INNER PEACE WITH CONSTANT CLICKING AND STATIC?!”   

 

I’m saying it right now:  my next phone is a Jitterbug.

 

 

Fiduciary Advice From Auntie Inga

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published March 15, 2017] ©2017

 

As you’ve probably been reading, the fiduciary rule – the one that says that financial advisors have to put the client’s interests first – may not go into effect in April after all. A recent article in US News reported that non-fiduciary advice costs Americans $17 billion a year.  And my response is: only $17 billion?

 

Welcome to Inga’s School of Fiduciary Failures. I’ve never had a single piece of good financial advice from a broker or a bank. You’d think that just once somebody would have sold me a product that inadvertently made money not just for them, but for me too.  But nope! Even in up years when people were routinely making 10-15%, I had investments that were losing that much.

 

In 1984, a year after becoming single, I invested a $6,000 inheritance with a broker at a downtown La Jolla brokerage with the hope of buying a new (used) car in two years. He invested it all into international currency bond funds. I was lucky to get $3,000 back. Important lessons: (1) Never ever invest in vehicles you don’t understand (2) do not buy investments from someone you’re dating.  (2) may in fact be even more important than (1).

 

My father always had a stock broker. People in my generation still think of it as a respectable profession. But we would be wrong. Now that there are virtually no more company pensions, we’ve all had to become investors, making our own retirement fund decisions.  We’re basically roadkill for the vultures who populate this industry.

 

After the brokerage fiasco, I tried to get my investment advice from “financial counselors” at my bank. But the turnover of those folks was higher than the swing shift at Jack in the Box. It didn’t help that my banks kept folding (the one on Pearl where the mattress store is now went down for fraud) or being swallowed up by bigger banks (all the rest of them).

 

At one of my myriad ex-banks (where US Bank is now) I took their free Finance for Women course which came with a complimentary financial consultation afterwards. I showed up with my check for $1,000 and said that after taking the course, I had targeted a particular fund that I thought suited my financial goals. Oh, no, says the investment counselor, she’d like to suggest a much better fund for me from the Pacific group of funds. Turns out that the ONLY funds they sold were Pacific Funds which obviously were hugely commission-driven for them. I’m embarrassed to report (I am such a slow learner) that I allowed myself to be convinced that the Pacific fund was the better investment, a sentiment I did not share a year later when it was worth $800 (in an up market!) and the investment lady was long gone.  (Soon after, so was the bank.) 

 

When we got a home equity loan to remodel our kitchen at the big red brick bank on Girard, their investment advisor attempted to get us to put our investments “under the umbrella” of their bank so they could “manage” them for us.  “Bwaaahahaha,” I said.  

 

I should note that along the way, I have had two excellent sources of financial advice. I had three dates with a really seedy boiler room guy.  (Those are the guys still swimming around the dating pool when you suddenly find yourself divorced at 35.)  No background in finance required in his biz. Arrest record OK. His company targeted mid-westerners who would send back a card from some publication where this company heavily advertised. The investments were total crap; the boiler room guy said they made 40% on every deal.  Why doesn’t word get around? I asked.  Because people only brag about making money, not losing it, he said.  Thank you, seedy boiler room guy.   

 

My second and definitely best source of financial advice was, of course, my second husband Olof.  Olof, who has always done his own investing, was horrified at the “investment” advice I had received. He convinced me that I could read a prospectus as well as anyone (a subject strangely absent in the Finance for Women course).  More to the point, the advantage I had over an “investment advisor” was that I was putting myself first in the profit equation. At my worst, I did better than I had done with “professional” advice.

 

I don’t want to suggest that all financial advisors should be painted with the same brush. In the absence of Olof, I would totally trust my financial advisor neighbor Bob but only because Bob knows me really really well. He is not confused that if he churned my account, his cruelly dismembered remains would be found in the ashes of his house. And that’s really the most important lesson I’ve learned in all this: whoever manages your money should be clear on your definition of “fiduciary.”

 

 

 

The Happiest Years Of Your Life

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published March 8, 2017] ©2017

 

Some months ago, AARP Bulletin ran an article about happiness and cited a study that maintained people reached the peak of happiness in their lives between 65 and 70.

 

This, of course, immediately piqued my interest since Olof and I are both in that demographic.

 

Some of this happiness argument makes sense.  By 65 you’ve presumably turfed the kids, have maybe even paid off the mortgage, and may well have grandchildren.  In our case, I think it helps that both Olof and I have decided that we’re about as good as we’re ever going to be.

 

Since 60 has been deemed to be the new 40 (who comes up with this stuff?????), one is statistically likely to still have a modicum of health, which is defined as two working hip joints and at least one working knee. Personally, I have the body of a centenarian.  I used to say that between childhood polio, a horrific auto accident, and just plain age that I had the body of a 90 year old, but my 90-year-old friend Natasha, and my 95-year-old mother-in-law both have stronger backs and clearer minds than I do. 

 

But if 60 is the new 40, there’s pretty strong agreement that 70 is still the old seventy. It’s like your body knows it can’t keep up the pretense any more. I have to confess that when I see obituaries of people in their 70s, I’m inclined to think, “Well, they were OLD.” I’ve had to work overtime to keep up the disconnect now that I am edging up on that decade. It is a testament to the power of self-delusion that I’m still able to see people who pass away in their 60s as dying young.

 

The AARP-quoted study maintained that people tend to be least happy in their teen years and 20’s. Personally, I think eighth grade is a year that should be put out of its misery. I’ve never known anyone who was happy in eighth grade. 

 

All sorts of factors determine happiness. Most moms I know would say they are only as happy as their least happy child. And then there’s the common expression, “Happy wife, happy life.”  Or as we say in our house, “Healthy dog, happy life.” We spent a whole lot of our life and assets at the vet last year.

 

Of course, most decades are mixtures of good times and bad, but I had one decade that was pretty much a total loss. 

 

My thirties were the tough years. I got divorced. I had two tiny kids. I was poor. I had an entry level job that in its initial phase was so mind-numbingly boring that I used to have fantasies of drinking White-Out (the stuff you used to make corrections on typewriter-generated copy in the pre-computer Pleistocene era.)  Swimming laps in a very depressing dating pool, I watched my criteria for suitable guys shrink to “hasn’t been in prison.” I was really, really lonely.

 

I was 19 when I became engaged to my first husband while still in college. Let me just say that the rules of dating in high school and early college are a whole lot different than dating as a 30-something divorcee with little kids. I decided with true Pollyanna optimism that everyone has good qualities so if someone asked me out, I initially always said yes. Everyone deserves a chance.

 

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Who knew how many sociopathic commodities brokers were out there?   “Sociopathic commodities broker,” by the way, is all one term. I still can’t believe how polite I was to these guys. I even got a marriage proposal from one of them. Actually, I think my house got the marriage proposal. (It, unlike me, had commercial value.) I guess he went long on pork bellies when he should have gone short.

 

In my 39^th year, my now-husband Olof came back into my life. We were high school exchange students together in Brazil our senior year of high school and knew we’d be lifelong friends. So my forties were exponentially happier. Who knew what a difference it made when you could actually believe a word the other person said? 

 

Other than health issues of the cancerous persuasion for both Olof and me and one horrific auto accident, the fifties and sixties have been pretty good too. I do wish spinal transplants were not in their infancy. Travel is no fun when the airplane seats are torture and the beds leave you crippled in the morning.

 

The AARP article said to not make your happiness dependent on other people.  I’d have to disagree. For the last 30 years, happiness has been where Olof is.

 

So we’ve still got a little time before we leave the AARP-designated happiest years of our lives and descend into the dark unknown of the 70’s.  There’s only one conclusion to make: Let’s just party on, Olof.