SSH and SCP require a place to store the SSH security keys used by the account under which the SCP is occurring. Normally, that's under $HOME/.ssh. You can probably override that with an scp command line option.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.