“Last Chance?” Till the Next One

One of the more entertaining regular events I experienced in my last couple of years at a for-profit music school was students and students’ parents asking to either retake my course finals or, when they had blown off homework, exams, or other opportunities, to do the work after the last day of class and grades were submitted to the school’s administration. My response was usually “What part of ‘final’ do you not understand?” Unsympathetic, I’m sure, but it’s not like the last day of class or the class preparation for final exams weren’t pretty clear warnings that “the end is near.”

A few years away from that semi-academic environment and I’m having second thoughts about my attitude toward those students. Not that I would do much differently and I absolutely wouldn’t behave differently toward parents who should know better, but “the last chance” offers we all get from idiot corporations and dire warnings of “campaign deadlines” from politicians have possibly trained us to think deadlines and cutoff dates are a moving target. Clearly, when it comes to deals and political contributions, those targets are fake and a dime-a-dozen.

For example, in 2019 when Quicken decided to simultaneously force customers/victims to a subscription format and change their file format to something proprietary so that exporting Quicken data to another money management format would be as close to impossible as possible, I quit updating Quicken on a once-every-two-year basis, which I had been doing since the 90s. Now, I’m stuck entering my banking data manually, but I’m retired and don’t have that much data entry to worry about. Quicken never handled investment information particularly well, but my investment bank does that job competently on-line, so I don’t care much about that flaw in Quicken’s capabilities.

So, since sometime in 2019, every few days I get a “last chance deal” from Quicken to save 50% on the latest version of Quicken, which will forever convert my data to that non-transferable format and make me a damn subscriber instead of a software owner. I haven’t been counting, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve had at least 50 “last chances” to make the switch. All I take away from most of this urgent bullshit is that companies and politicians either think we’re idiots or they are constantly on the desperate edge of failure.