Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age but I tend to expect technology to ‘just work’.

No reading manuals.

Maybe a glance at a quick start guide.

But when that doesn’t work?

What next?

Well, in my case, it was a webinar I’d planned to run.

I decided to use a platform called AnyMeeting – they’re one of the second tier of webinar providers and had the lure that, so long as I was prepared to have adverts around the webinar, there was no cost.

So far, so good.

We’re all used to tuning out of adverts anyway so that wasn’t a big “no”.

Plus I didn’t know whether or not I’d be running webinars on a regular basis so the idea of a monthly subscription didn’t appeal.

I’d used the platform before and – from memory – it had worked as promised.

But this time it didn’t.

Screen share was the whole desktop or or a webcam. No option to focus on just one window of the desktop as I’d expected and as their help led me to believe.

Or if there was an option, it wasn’t making itself known.

Plus my microphone wasn’t being picked up.

That’s a serious problem.

The microphone I use is the default one in Windows and it works fine with everything else. So I had no reason to suspect that it wouldn’t work with the webinar software.

But it didn’t work 🙁

One of the (very patient) attendees suggested using Google Hangouts.

I signed into Google but – unusually for one of their products – found the whole process too convoluted to be able to get it working quickly enough.

Again, I’d expect it to just work.

No-one reads manuals – the days of computers coming with several text book size manuals are long gone.

It’s just one sheet of paper as a quick start guide.

The same goes for other techie stuff.

I read a review about the latest boys toy – drones – and it said that the reviewer had done what they expected 99% of buyers to do. Just follow the quick start instructions.

But it seems that webinars aren’t that advanced yet.

Hangouts will evolve and become user friendly.

In the meantime, I’ll need to do some research on YouTube and Google and do a test run.

It’s probably all hidden behind a bunch of icons that would look appropriate on a mobile phone but don’t look appropriate on a computer screen. Which also explains why Windows 8 wasn’t a success.

So it was back to Plan C.

Fire up my regular screen recording software and use that.

Then upload the result to YouTube.

Egg on my face? Yes.

But in my defence I wasn’t expecting technology to not work.

And here’s the YouTube recording: