I book my travel almost exclusively through a single airline and its affiliates. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the big one is status. And no, not so I get upgrades (although they are very nice), but so when things go wrong, I have a hotline to getting them fixed. However, I don’t want to talk about that today, I want to talk technology. See, my airline’s web site won’t run properly on my work laptop.

And works everywhere else.

Oh, I’ve tried it all. Changed the location on my VPN. Turned off my VPN. Browser A. Browser B. Browser C (even though I vowed I’d never install that junk ever again). Heck, off-brand Browser D. Uninstall the VPN. Reset the internet connection. Tether from the phone. Install updates. Get on the phone with tech support. Clear the browser cache (like going to a different browser doesn’t obviate the need for this one, but, hey) and the history.

Yet, if I walk three feet to my personal laptop, it works fine. My wife doesn’t have a problem. I can log in from my phone. My children’s laptops also connect. Nope. It’s just the one laptop.

After all that, you know the one thing I have learned?

Technology is hard.

I mean think about it. We have these web pages that work, almost, for everyone, almost, all the time, almost. Yeah, I know, joking. However, they really do work, and for huge swaths of the populace, despite all the wild variation on technologies employed. Yet, when things go south, very tiny as in my case, or huge when systems are hacked or experience internally generated outages, they go very badly wrong. Recovery is hard. Troubleshooting, extremely difficult, even if you have the skill (and too many do not), takes forever. All of it hurting our organizations and causing pain for ourselves.

We are in a position where we’re working miracles, but it’s all with some pretty brittle tech because, frankly, this stuff isn’t easy.

Now, I need to grab my other laptop so I can book a trip.