My greatest pet peeve about technology is that it often doesn’t take change well.  I wish it was easy to put multiple accounts together, and to weed out any duplicates that occur in the process.  Take contact lists, for example.  Why is it that when I try to sync my Google contacts with my phone, I end up getting a whole lot of the same entries, instead of a clean list?  I understand if they need to ask me about the merge if different versions of the contacts contain different information (such as one only has email and the other only has phone number, or the listed contact information doesn’t match).  However, it’s just not that easy and I’ve had to manually go through and sort through the listings to correct them, which is quite tedious.

Another thing that totally baffled me recently is Apple IDs.  They don’t always make it clear when you are making a new one, so I somehow ended up with two even though I meant to change my primary email address for my account.  I did some research and they make it very clear that they do not merge accounts, so I had to figure out which account to keep as my main one.  Why it is that they can’t combine your accounts with a data migration is beyond me.  Perhaps I don’t understand enough of the coding, but nevertheless, this is a common issue that people have and I feel that it’s worth any trouble to create a good system to do so.

I also don’t see why user IDs can’t be easily updated as we wish, so we can change our minds as often as we want.  After all, we go through life changes all the time, sometimes wanting a fun screen name, sometimes wanting a professional one, and sometimes just wanting one other than what we have.  Why create an entire account just because of that?  It would make so much more sense to keep all the information that has been associated with an account and just change the username you log in with or share with others.

It’s amazing that it has been so long and still these improvements that would allow us so much more control over our accounts are not something we can expect from any form of technology we choose to use.  The pains of trying to get around it or fix it almost don’t even make it worth it either.  Whatever happened to technology being able to make your life easier?  It seems to be causing me a whole lot of (time-consuming) problems instead!