Superb Owl

Notification is the word of the week.

I was notified of a "fraud action" in my credit card account a few weeks ago, it took several calls and three new cards to get it straightened out—the first replacement card had been sent to the address of a registered sex offender in Texas! It’s been a week now and things have seemed to have settled down. Whether this was a result of the Target security breach or not, it was a bit scary.

One series of notifications I didn’t appreciate was from Twitter. I had a Twitter account years ago, when it was just starting to gain traction, but I never quite “got” it. Ditto for FB and Linkedin.  Recently I was intrigued by the literary site Medium so I signed up for the service—registration required a Twitter account.  I had been following a few people on Twitter already, so I thought I’d give it a try.  I was still a bit leery, so I used my “junk” email address to sign up.  About the same time, I started using my MacBook's Mail notifications. I hadn’t used that feature in the past but now it seemed to be a good idea. 

Big mistake.

I started getting emails from Twitter, notifying me of not just those twitterers I followed, but also a bunch of other “suggested” tweets from people I didn’t know, and didn’t care to know.  Spam is bad enough without inviting it in so I cancelled it again. Twitter me not.

On a somewhat related note, I deleted my YouTube account. While hardly the most watched channel, I did have some videos which featured musical performances. With recent witch hunts by BIG MUSIC in the news I couldn’t see any upside in allowing my posts to be under this kind of scrutiny. Another factor was YouTube’s constant “notifications” to enroll me in Google+, yet another “service” with no upside for me.

I did embrace some digital technology, however, by getting my very first cell phone last week! I had resisted for years, but have finally accepted that when I am out and about, especially on my little travel adventures, it might be a lifesaver. I narrowed my choices down to a iPhone 5s (more chances of notifications) or a cheesy flip-phone (with no internet access).  When I ran the numbers for cost of ownership for two years the iPhone was about two grand (at least!), while the flip-phone would be about two hundred.  I’d say that's a no-brainer.

Now if I start getting notifications on my little "flippist fone" (whose number only members of my family know) I will be really bummed.