To be totally sick of modern technology and having to do so much online

[Lifeomars]

i have been almost reduced to screaming and crying over the past three days due to almost everything having to be dealt with online.

!. I ordered some hair straighteners online from Boots, all fine and dandy. I got a text from Royal Mail saying they would be delivered on 26 Nov and giving me the tracking details. They never showed up and tracking showed them as being at sorting centre. This message showed every day for the following week, trying to track it online did not work. Going onto Boots website had a piece of info saying not to contact them until 7 working days had elapsed without them turning up. 7 days passed and I went back on the Boots site .After a good few minutes of scrolling through rather unclear information I then had to engage with a bot to try and explain what was happening (or not happening in my case). The box to enter my order number in would not work and after trying for 20 mins and feeling like ripping my (unstraightened) hair our I tried to use the email facility. This took another 10 minutes as all you are allowed to do is scroll though to find the option. It keeps trying to divert you to their FAQ but in the end I managed to fill it in. The whole process was hideous and I kept thinking that a 5 minute conversation with a human being would have sorted it out.

2, Today I had a message from my phone provider EE saying I had exceeded my "spend cap". I have been with them for two years and was not even aware that I had one. Can't phone them as I now cannor use my phone, can't log into my account on my laptop as I cannot remember my password (never use the online account). To set a new password requires that they send me a text, phone is now not even receiving texts which is odd so atm I am phoneless. I do not use my phone excessively, a bit of WhatsApp, some texts, and all the online stuff is done via my broadband account. Basically I feel that I have been almost driven to the brink by tech over the past few days. Great when it works but when it plays up it seems to take so much mental energy to sort it all out.

My son has a 'smart' train card called keyGo which is linked to my debit card. Also linked to that is his 16-17 saver railcard which effectively gives a 50% discount. The keyGo card is supposed to work by calculating the cheapest fare available for the times you touch in and out then charge that to my debit card.

When you look on his account on the train company website it states that the railcard is keyGo enabled, yet it doesn't work and consequently has been double-charging for every journey he has made since he started college in September. In fact, for some journeys it seems to be an arbitrary figure altogether bearing no relation to even the adult fare for those journeys.

I have been trying since the middle of September to get it sorted - they originally told me they'd remove the railcard and reinstate it because apparently one has to be done before the other to link them, but NOWHERE is this information available to the hapless traveller (or their mother), but they are now saying I should have added the railcard back on myself, which I can't do because they didn't remove it. There is no facility for me to do so, and it's already on there and won't let me duplicate it. It's like some sort of dystopian nightmare where they're blaming me for not doing something that a.) I didn't know I had to, and b.) their systems don't allow me to do.

The same train company regularly shortchange me on delay repay compensation too, but once they have approved your compensation, there's no way to contact them to dispute the amount - I've had to go all round the houses through their main customer email, which informs me they'll try and get back to me within 20 days!

I do several different jobs, and last night I was on the Government Gateway site updating my estimated earnings on them so I pay the right amount of tax. I had to access the online payslips for one of my jobs, only to discover my account has been randomly locked for a reason I can't fathom. I dread to think how long that's going to take to resolve, in my own time given that I only do the job from April to September.

I never had that problem with paper payslips. I'm currently a Christmas temp with Royal Mail. Appropriately enough they send paper payslips in the post, and that actually bloody works.