Old Man Yells at Cloud Storage.
How long is too long to spend on a technical problem? I spent 20 minutes yesterday trying to figure out why OneDrive wasn’t loading on my laptop when it was perfectly fine on every other device I had.
It was some kind of iCloud keychain problem. Or more likely a Microsoft vs iCloud Keychain problem.
I’ve never come to grips with pass keys, which seem to be the secret sauce of the new, improved keychain. I don’t really understand them and why they’re so much better than passwords and I’m at that age where I don’t care to learn. So after 20 minutes of fuck-knuckling around, I closed the laptop and said to myself, “On the weekend, I’mma take this into the Apple Store like an old man who knows nothing and I’m gonna let them sort it out while I tell a series of long meandering stories about the olden days.”
In those days I might have got online and spent five or six hours figuring it out. I regard my new resolve to be a cantankerous old Luddite as progress and I very much look forward to my dotage.
I do wonder though, how long is too long to spend on a technical problem?
Not a specific answer to the question 'how long should I spend fixing a technical issue' because individual milage may vary due to experience, knowledge time available, patience and whether or not you feel like your life is racing to the grave. But the inimitable XKCD did post about a similar conundrum https://xkcd.com/1319/
20 minutes is long enough to work out whether I know, or can work out, how to fix something or know that it's way past my level of competence.