Ouch!!. Both literally and figuratively. Good to hear that your second try went so much better.
This similar but smaller rant occurred to my GF yesterday.
She had a imaging scheduled at her usual clinic. Checked in online the day prior, got email and confirmatory texts for her appointment at 10:40am. Next day drives down there, arrives timely, goes to the check-in desk.
Clerk: You’re late; your appointment was at 10:00! GF: Wanna see all the emails and texts from your computer that say 10:40? It’s 10:35 right now. Clerk: No! My computer says 10:00 and that’s the only one that matters! Sit here and we’ll try to work you in. Snarl!
Cue 90 minute sit followed by going back to see a tech who’s pissed that her lunch break has been sacrificed for this lazy patient who showed up late. Of course the tech certainly didn’t want to see the scheduling texts & emails either. She’d been told this pt. was supposed to be their 10:00 and that was that.
Of course that 90 minute sit fouled up the rest of GF’s already jam-packed day and we almost missed our evening’s live show performance due to her getting to me about an hour late. After lots of her gotta-do activities had to be skipped to catch up. Gaah!
Can’t anyone in IT play these games? Or are they too busy with their anti-phishing campaigns to ensure their scheduling systems talk to each other and use the same clocks?
I had an appointment scheduled for 10am today but I had a feeling it was not really an appointment, just my error in writing it down. But I couldn’t get in touch with the front desk in time. So I had to go in at the time of my appointment and ask if I had an appointment, which, unsurprisingly, I did not. The appointment is not until April. I don’t know why I wrote it down for today, but I also had it scheduled in for April.
At any rate, I had to spend all of that time not having an appointment and got to work late as if I had the appointment. Perfect waste of time.
So, your GF is always late for everything, apparently!
Just kidding – I’d be infuriated if I got a text confirming an appointment time and the receptionist claimed it had been 40 minutes earlier! And refused to look at my text.
“My computer says 10:00 and that’s the only one that matters!” I’d be tempted to pick up the monitor and smash it on the floor. “Not any more, it doesn’t!”. (I would resist the temptation, but perhaps with difficulty.) Nothing pisses me off more than petty bureaucracy.
Hubby’s credit card got charged 0.50 CHF from some well-known scammer, and the credit card company reversed the charge and blocked his credit card.
That’s how it should be.
But it seems that the Netflix account has some other issues, including having a device in Australia, where we’ve never been. So there’s some additional fun there.
The other automatic charges were easy to fix.
He’s now talking to Netflix customer support. Fun stuff for a Saturday.
And he needs the desktop, which I would like to use for getting tax papers done. So I’m very annoyed at the scammers in this world, since it seems we managed to find two this week.
And this happened on Wednesday, and he got the new card number in the credit card app on Thursday, and then received the physical card on Friday. So today was the first time he could update the different accounts.
To her credit, she is dealing with an overwhelming task list in her life right now. Such that every day is jammed to the gills with shit that needs doing ASAP. Many of which involve other people, or balky websites, or whatever, where stuff never happens until she’s overcome everyone else’s entropy. Like her imaging visit I mentioned upthread.
But it’s also the case that her basic “How long does it take to do task X?” estimator is permanently set to “unrealistically short”. And she’s real good at ignoring the inevitable frictional losses between tasks. No honey, the car doesn’t start driving 10 seconds after you stand up to go find your purse, your shoes, take a piss, touch up your lipstick, and walk downstairs to the car. More like 10 minutes. On a good day.
Sigh. But otherwise she’s awesome and we’re making progress on both of her time challenges.
You might wish that was so. You might well do that yourself. But bad date handling is rife in IT.
And as you know, ISO 8601 does not demand timezones, does not demand synced clocks, does not demand common precision, etc. All it demands is you write the components of a (partial) date plus optional (partial) time in a specific sequence with specific punctuation.
Every snowflake demands being frozen. But no two are alike. Date / time interchange systems may demand ISO8601 formatting on the surface, but they’re all different under the hood. Or can be. And usually are. And not in a good way.
I guess because it falls outside of the norm. If they really need to do this there needs to be another way to get access. What happens if my phone gets lost/stolen, or broken? That happened to me two years ago going to Spain, I shattered my phone at the airport. It was bad enough I couldn’t see it, luckily I didn’t need it for a couple of days and could repair it.
Many places now offer an option of an email verification. Because they do get that SMS is not worldwide universal and especially not while roaming a country other than your home.
They’re looking at the problem from their end. They don’t really care that you’re locked out. Their interest is in preventing baddies from getting in, not in avoiding all possible forms of customer lock-out.
A couple / few years ago I had no end of trouble with a new credit card. I’d buy something for a couple hundred bucks two counties away from home and they’d lock my card for suspicious activity. I’d buy something for a couple hundred bucks while in some foreign country and they’d lock my card for suspicious activity. They were super-sensitive about any usage outside my immediate home area. Getting it reactivated was a long wait on hold for a non-English speaking CS person the read the script saying they were doing this for my benefit. Yeah, sure you are.
The kicker: The card was an airline branded card that gave you airline miles based on your purchases and that was marketed especially and directly to people who travel a lot and spend a lot while doing so. The whole and entire point of the card is to make purchases away from home. Stupid shits.
I finally bit the bullet and started working on my taxes. Being a COF (Certified Old Fart) I still do this by downloading the required form/instructions, filling them out, and mailing them in. I knew that this year was going to be a tad more complicated because I had started receiving Social Security benefits and I was going to have to figure out whether any of it was taxable. Also, last year I had some repair work done on my roof which included having the skylight replaced. I was told that the new skylight qualified for a 30% tax credit, which of course involved using a new form. One of the requirements for this form is providing a QMID (Qualified Manufacturer ID) for the manufacturer to verify that it qualifies. This was not on any of the info I was given by the installer, although the invoice clearly stated that the skylight qualified for the tax credit. I was unable to locate it on the manufacturer’ website, nor on any online listings of QMIDs. So I finally called their customer service number to see if they could provide it.
Guess what? It turns out that Velux doesn’t have a QMID, because they no longer participate in the program that assigns them. I was given some BS about how despite the fact that their products do meet the requirements to be considered “energy efficient” they no longer participate in the program that assigns QMIDs. Supposedly this would have incurred fees which would have required them to increase the costs of their products, blah, blah, blah. I haven’t checked with the IRS yet, but I suspect that if I don’t have a QMID I can’t apply for the credit.
Monday I plan to get in touch with the company that installed the skylight to let them know that they’re using products that do not qualify for the promised tax credit. I’m sure I’ll get a runaround from them, but maybe it will stop them from passing on misinformation about the tax credit.
As I’m sure you know, this is pretty much a recurring story in large organizations. You’ll have a marketing department that decides it would be a terrific idea to offer a credit product like this. And then you have pinheads in “risk management” or whatever they want to call themselves who do what’s best for their own little fiefdoms and hope to get bonuses for being so clever at reducing fraud! Even so, this seems rather ridiculously extreme.
A third: we in the third world very much rely on USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) which is a fairly old fashioned way to send a message to a phone.
I log onto my very modern banking app, then await a very old-school message format popup that requires me to enter either 1 or 0 (yes/no)
It works really well, and fairly fast. Not really user-friendly but it gets the job done, much better that farting around with OTP codes.
And it is just as secure (that is, reasonably secure, it is certainly hack-able). But so are OTP codes.
I have to ask. Has she been evaluated for ADHD? Always being late and time blindness are pretty common issues ADHDers have. She may well be busy, but it’s possible her feeling of overwhelm is being magnified by an untreated condition.
I don’t believe she’s been evaluated. My own amateur assessment of her behavior doesn’t make me think ADHD. As and when her personal overload winds down, which ought to be in a month or two, we’ll have a chance to see what she’s like when not stressed to the max. I’ll keep that idea on file.
Now we just have to get you to a place where you’re not stressed to the max all day every day for years.
Yes, LSLGuy’s CC company was being ridiculous. However, I don’t think you can assign extra blame to the risk management pinheads - there is likely no easy indicator in their algorithm that that credit card is tied to a airline miles card. Should there be? Arguably yes, but not a slam dunk from the corporate view balancing IT development costs, risk management, customer engagement, etc, etc, etc.
I find it stressful but I also like my life. There are a lot of people with a lot of stress who don’t even like their lives, so I’m coming out ahead there.
My cards with Bank of America will lock if they are used in a different area, except the bank app on my phone tracks where I am because of location services. So it’s never a problem when I travel.
Yeah, I’ve tried letting Visa know when employees were traveling to South America, and they said “don’t bother, we know”. The employees have the app. Amex knows too, but we don’t use their app. Idk how they know.
Nothing pisses me off more than petty bureaucracy.