The other day I told my college-age nephew that I had just gone through the annual process of threatening to cancel SiriusXM in order to get my same rate for another year.
When I finished, he gave me a :dubious: look and said “That sounds so needlessly complicated…”
If you had to teach a college kid the ways of the world, what would be your “WTF” bits of life that we all deal with but are needlessly complicated?
Renewing my SiriusXM contract is a perfect example.
Every year when my fixed rate is about to finish I call Sirius and tell them how I love their product, but Pandora is sounding pretty good on my car radio and I just don’t drive that much and so on and so on. The customer service rep invariably tells me what a great customer I have been and then magically comes up with a half-price plan, with more channels than I already get, with Internet streaming as well.
I then accept the new (same price) plan and add an appointment to my iPhone calendar for a year minus a week away, to repeat the whole process again. This is my 4th year so far of getting the “special half-price plan”. If I forget to do this, my bill will double at the end of the year. We all know this and we all play the game.
As he gets near the end of his college experience, he may be tempted to take off a semester or two to get a job, an internship, to travel, or otherwise not finish the degree right now, with the expectation of just being able to re-apply to college and finish up those last two or three classes.
Do not do this.
Colleges love nothing so much as moving goalposts; so long as you have continual enrollment from the beginning to the end of your degree, you get to graduate once you’ve jumped through all the hoops they said when you first enrolled. If they have changed the requirements for new enrollees since you started taking classes, if you go in hiatus and return, you will probably have to satisfy the new requirements, which means your two or three classes will turn into seven or eight. A friend of mine stopped one quarter short (2 classes) of a BA in Music; when she tried to re-enroll, the curriculum had mutated and now they’re saying she’ll have to take two and a half years of classes in order to finish the degree, because so many of the classes she originally took don’t count towards the new graduation requirements. Granted, she took off 20 years, but still. That’s just silly.
And for god’s sake, don’t try to transfer to a different college under any circumstances. Finish one degree where you started, then start a new one somewhere else if you must. A second BA won’t kill you.
I just want to thank you for this post. Our plan was set to renew for 2 years for something over $350 and I told them I saw there were cheaper deals and I wanted a better price or I would cancel. I’m now getting a year for under $100.
I have a Kobo reader. Last week I ordered 4 books by the same author. Four times, I had to go to their search engine, enter the authors name, choose the book and purchase it. Why can’t they implement an add-to-cart procedure? I also got emailed 4 separate receipts.
The following has improved. I order four Astronomical Calendars every November for myself and 3 relatives. Their web site still does not allow you to order more than one. So you call. It used to be that the poor guy at the other end had not only to put in four names and addresses, but enter the credit card number four times. Now they have the names and addresses from the previous year and need enter the CC number only once. But you still cannot do it online.
When I resubscribe to Scientific American, I do it for three years at a somewhat reduced price. But their online subscription service allows only one year. Why?
As a retired prof, I’m getting money from the TIAA-CREF system. Somehow I’ve managed to get my money in 6 different “things”. So I get 6 statements telling me what my monthly income is going to be. But no total of course. Somehow there are only 3 echecks though. Which makes double checking if it comes out right even harder than if they kept them separate. Just did taxes. So that’s 6 W-2s to enter.* There was one of the boxes that was coded differently so there should have been at most 2. Again, no totals listed anywhere on paper or online.
I want to move some money around different accounts with them. Apparently this will just multiply the problem.
And of course TurboTax doesn’t understand the concept of multiple W-2s from the same place. Can’t just do a “ditto” on any fields.
I’m really annoyed that I can’t easily sign up for automatic online payments for one of my student loans. With one of the loans I simply entered my bank info and that was that. For the other lender I have to physically mail in paperwork for them to process and authorize the automatic debit which can take several months.
But it could be worse- for a long time this lender wouldn’t accept online payments at all. I had to physically mail in a check every month.
Of course this lender is the US Government. I’ve had automatic payments set up with Sallie Mae without a problem for years.
Our health care provider is a big hospital with lots of associated branch clinics and kept doctors.
This system has four completely separate billing departments. They do not communicate with each other. At all.
I found this out when I lost the mailing address for a bill, found an address on another bill from the same system, sent my check to it, and got a collection notice in the mail a while later.
You don’t think enough has changed in two decades to warrant the need for more updated classes in some areas prior to earning a college degree? Two years, I could maybe get behind your way of thinking. Twenty years? No way.
Yeah, it’s not taking a semester or two off that causes the problem- I knew people who did that thirty years ago with no problem and my son did it last year with no problem.The most that might be required is an application for a leave of absence (which might be limited to a year or two, but requirements don’t change that drastically in two years). Other institutions don’t even require an application for re-admission after a single semester off. Still other institutions have a strict time limit- I had 7 years to finish a 60 credit MBA (which I didn’t) ,whether I took any semesters off or not.
Thanks for the tip, Ethilrist. Though I agree with others that 20 years is a bit of a stretch, it might be easy to stop for a year or two, expecting to trivially pick up where one left off. And I can well imagine that The System won’t allow it to be as easy as that. I will warn both of my college kids about this.
Regarding healthcare…
I get a kick out of the fantastic and totally ludicrous bills generated by hospitals.
Last year my wife was being fed via an intravenous PICC line, a long snaky IV tube that goes from one’s upper arm to the entrance of the heart. This pumped measured amounts of a special food into her body as her stomach healed.
One she felt something wet on her arm. She looked down and was horrified to see that the tape had come loose and the line had pulled out about an inch. We couldn’t just push it back in because not only was the exposed inch no longer sterile, but the tip of the line was near her heart.
The home care nurse, sent us to the emergency room. They said “We won’t have a PICC line team available until tomorrow so we will admit her”, they admitted her in about 15 minutes (a record, I believe). The next day the “team” turned out to be one talented doctor who came with the X-ray equipment to position a new line. She was back home by early afternoon.
When the bill came I was shocked to see that it was something like $43,000. The insurance company then said “Nope. We’re only allowing $3000”, and the final bill to us was around $250.
The crazy thing is, nobody would ever pay that 43K. The insurance company doesn’t. An uninsured person would never pay that either. It is a totally fictional number that makes no sense whatsoever. It’s as if they say “Let’s put something crazy down and see what they’ll pay” or “Let’s start outrageously high, so when we ask for $10k they think we are doing them a favor”
Seriously, what did they do to merit that kind of pay in 24 hours? The emergency room staff triaged her, did the standard admission stuff, and immediately admitted her. For the rest of the day the nurses made their rounds. Sure, the machine might be costly, and the 30 minutes of the specialist’s time. That had better be one amazing specialist to bill like that.
You’re welcome. Sweet!
Don’t forget to put an event on your calendar for next April 15th or so to remind you to repeat the process.
Similar to the OP, every six months - a year, I call the cable company and ask to downgrade my services to lower the bill. This always ends with me walking away with more premium channels, or faster internet service, and paying a lower price.
You know, up until like, a month or two ago, this is how Amazon MP3s worked. Amazon! Amazon who’s been selling shit online since the ice age! And MP3s for a darn long time.
They at least managed to send you one receipt - if you bought all your songs within a short timespan. But if you took too long between purchases (I dunno like 10 mins?) they would send you one little 99 receipt.
They finally fixed it and added a MP3 cart. But it took years and years.
Now I have to find someone else to bitch about.
Getting rid of these two small trees in my front yard for as cheaply as possible is turning out to be a really long task. Everything I can do myself takes forever.
Without a problem? Don’t send in a lump sum payment, then. I made the mistake of using a $5000 gift to pay down a chunk of my loan, and in response, Sallie Mae recalculated my monthly auto-debit amount. So now the monthly payments are lower, but it will take just as long to pay off. Which is what I was trying to avoid. A written letter and three phone calls later and it is apparently impossible to set a monthly Sallie Mae auto-debit to $X + 100 once it’s been reduced to $X. They tell me they’ll do it and then they don’t, and are baffled when I call and tell them it’s still wrong. So I wait for the auto-debit to go out, then I make an extra payment on top of that manually.
Wait what? I wanna pay half price for XM. OTOH, it’s almost worth it to pay full price just to not have to deal with their customer service. I loath having to call them for anything. Most recently (just one of the problems): I’ve had four radios with them and every time I swap them I have to call (why can’t it be done online?) and every time they tell me they have to charge me a $20 ‘swap fee’ and every time I ask if they can waive it and every time they tell me ‘of course’. But last time they charged me anyways. When I called them and asked them about it they had to transfer me to ‘accounting’ which was nice because I was transferred back into the States from what I think was Vietnam. He tells me they did waive the ‘swap fee’…I was only charged with the ‘new radio fee’. I can’t believe they were going to charge me $40 just to get a new radio.
Actually, that’s how I got it waived the first time. It was near the end of the term when I got the new one and when I called to get it activated they told me about the swap fee and I told them I just spend $150 on a radio, all this money on a subscription and if I have to spend $20 for them to type in a few numbers I’m just taking it back and they’ve waived it without question.
Next year I’ll call them up and see if I can pay a few dollars less for my yearly subscription. It goes up about 10% every year without question. As much as I love it, it’s getting a bit pricy.
That sucks. Well I’ll keep that in mind if I ever am in that situation. Can you simply cancel the auto debit and pay the amount you’d like to pay monthly in one payment that’s not automatically debited?
Any and all interactions with any and all court(s) of law are teeth-gnashingly complicated, and mostly totally unnecessary, as far as any merely sane mortal can tell.
F’rinstance, I had an equipment-violation ticket (a “fix-it” ticket) a few years ago. Fairly minor thing (well, not exactly, it cost me $400), and it ended up all getting settled with the court just fine. But what a shit-fucking hassle it was!
The ticket told me I had some time-limit to respond (like, 2 weeks or 6 weeks or whatever). But I tried to call the phone number on the ticket to get an automated “status” report, and it took longer than that for the court to even know about the ticket! Then I tried to talk to a live person. You think it’s hard to get a live person on the phone at your insurance company or mortgage company? Forget it. The court provides utterly no access to a live clerk by phone! I had to go there in person and wait in some longish line to find out the status of my ticket. (Only to be told that they still had no record of it, and I shouldn’t try responding until they do.)
Does your bank offer a bill pay service? If so, I would think it would be better to have your bank send Sallie Mae whatever amount you choose instead of trusting Sallie Mae to take whatever amount they choose. Most bank bill pay services have an option to let you set up a payment of a fixed amount of your choosing every month.
That’s a really good idea. Do this if you still want it removed automatically, but cancel the direct automatic payment with Sallie Mae.
And make sure they do cancel it! I remember now the one and only problem I had with them- I asked them to change the date my payment was due and they said they would and that they would cancel the auto debit for that month to account for the change and they never did either. It wasn’t a big enough deal for me to complain, but I was annoyed that the rep didn’t follow through with what she said she would do.
Some payment methods, such as those which require a ZIP Code, assume that any 5-digit Postal Code will mean you are paying from the US even when the dropdown for “Country” is another one.
If you leave the Post Code blank you get a “required field blank” error, if you input a 5-digit code matching the rest of the address it tells you “ZIP Code does not match address” because hey, yeah, the Spanish province of Córdoba isn’t in Vermont, nor Málaga in Utah (waitaminute… Antonio Banderas isn’t from Salt Lake City? Are you sure?).
Apparently starting the check by looking at the Country field was too complicated :p. And yes, there is a Country field, so in theory that method was designed to accept payments from outside the US (the only country where that PoS is used AFAICT, which is good because it makes me want to go all Og-smash).
Dropdown menus which have been translated and which are in alphabetical order… by the original language (yeah, España totally goes after Islas Salomón, of course; bonus points for having España after Salomón Islas).
On occasion, I’ve put 00000 on the forms that don’t check that the country is “not the U.S” and therefore has no zip code.
I’ve had, though, other forms that are apparently programmed well enough to know that there may be a zip code (even if it is for another country), and accept the other country’s zip code.
