Had a good one the other day.
I have an account with Uber that I rarely use. I have their app installed on my Android phone. The credit card attached to the account was approaching the expiration date. So …
They send me an email saying “Your card’s about to expire. Click here to update your payment preferences.” Would that more websites with cards on file did the same thing. I get bounced renewals all the time from websites that aren’t proactive like this.
Anyhow, the email is a nice html one with a pretty button to click and everything. So on my PC I click the button. Which opens the browser, navigates to Uber with lots of mumbo-jumbo info behind the page url that ought to identify me and my situation. So far so promising.
It ends at an error page saying I must update my payment preferences only from the app on my phone. Grr!! Out of curiosity I log the browser out of Uber, close it, reopen it, manually navigate to Uber and log in as me. I go to the [payment methods on file] page and see that yup, it’s read-only. WTF???
So I drag out the phone, open the Uber app and navigate to the payment options. Now here I can edit my expiration date. So I do.
Over the next two weeks until the expiration date actually passed I get 3 more reminder emails. The first time one showed up I went back into Uber and checked, and yes, they did show the expiration date in 202X, not the one for Apr 2017. Both in the phone app and in the non-mobile version of their website.
One is not impressed.