SlashNOT

Matthew writes: Dear SlashNOT

I’m writing to you because I don’t know who else to turn to. I’m trapped in an abusive relationship. When I first met Bluetooth, I was very skeptical and ignored the marketing claims. But I knew other people thought Bluetooth was cool, so I figured that there must be something I’m not seeing. I decided to give it a whirl. First I bought a bluetooth wireless headset for my cell phone. The idea of a low-power wireless headset made me giddy with excitement. Af first, it was wonderful. But then it started screeching at me if I went even a few feet away from it. Then, the battery started giving out, and I felt like I was chained to charging it every 90 minutes. I kept having to pair the headset with the transceiver–it would somehow “forget” about it’s relationships. Anyway, I made excuses, like “Well, the audio quality isn’t great, but Bluetooth should work fine for something like a wireless mouse.”

So I had a Bluetooth transceiver installed in my laptop and I picked up a Microsoft Bluetooth mouse. I was excited about having a mouse that didn’t require a cord or a USB dongle hanging of my laptop–who wouldn’t be? But the honeymoon didn’t last long, and this turned out to be an even more painful experience. After I finally got the security setting set up on my laptop to get it to pair with my mouse, the tracking quality was just terrible. The cursor would pause before moving and then continue after the mouse stopped! This made it basically impossible to reliably point to anything. I was so ashamed that I stopped hanging out online with my friends. I didn’t want anyone to see what I was dealing with at home.

I even bought a Mac to try to make things work. Granted, that did end a lot of the annoying behaviors, but the core problems are still there. At this point, I’m so heavily invested in Bluetooth devices that I just don’t know if I have the courage to leave it. I don’t know if I trust myself to even choose a simple, decent wireless protocol that maybe has less features but would be reliable and wouldn’t “forget” about it’s relationships. Is there anything I can do to make my device pairings work reliably, or should I give up and move on to other wireless protocols?

JT in San Diego