Everyone knows the abbreviation IT these days. (But probably no one knows that it dates to 1958 …) My feeling is that its modern incarnation is often missing a few letters ahead of IT. Just like admin, IT departments love to inform us how they are only there to serve us when the reality is that their whole purpose seems increasingly to make their own lives easier by offering us, well, SHIT.
I’ve detailed any number of examples of this in this blog already. Like gaudy warning labels to save us from junk e-mails that come from outside the University of Not-Bielefeld system but can be tricked out by a simple spoofing of the sender’s e-mail address. Or airline ticketing systems that can book you on any number of code-shared flights with any number of partner airlines but can’t make seat reservations with those partners because of “technical restrictions”.
Even the banks are happily playing along with this …
I’ve got a pair of loans with a bank that I’m generally happy with. The service is impersonal and the rates and conditions are arbitrarily extortionary, both of which are a great deal better than I’m generally used to. I recently noticed that only one of my loans was showing up via online banking (who checks in that regularly to see how much they still owe, right?) and figured that I might as well get the second one up there too. Applied for this, immediately got the login details, and noticed that the username was different from my other one. In other words, a completely separate account with its own completely separate, impossible-to remember password (hint to the IT “specialists” out there: passwords do not have to be stupidly complex to be secure, just long and not obvious) and completely not what I was after.
When I telephoned the bank to explain that I curiously wanted both loans to be shown simultaneously, they replied that this was “technically impossible” because of the different user-account numbers even if I possibly and technically was the same user. Having ungraciously learned to admit defeat in such instances (call-centre people know even less about SHIT than the SHIT department), I just went with it and tried to activate this other account. Everything went smoothly until I started. Opened the website, entered my other user-account number, and was greeted with the message that my appTAN verification system was not yet activated and please refer to the appropriate letter for more information. The appropriate letter, however, only referred to a mobileTAN verification system. Another phone call, another round of excuses, and another letter coming my way, this time via snail mail for some reason.
It, of course, gets sillier …
… and lazier.
At my normal bank where I have my savings account, a recent update to their online-banking service means that I now have to log in three separate times just to view the transactions on my account. Once to get into the system in the first place, once again immediately afterwards to see if I really meant it, and then a third time to actually call up the transactions. When I contacted their SHIT department about it, the problem naturally lay on my end, not their update. Maybe my cookies were too restrictive. (Funny. They were just fine before the update.) If not, I could always use another browser. (True. I could also use another bank that likes my cookies the way they are.) How about just trying to do your job instead of making up lazy, SHITty excuses all the time?
And the list goes on and on …
Now, even if you don’t like my extra, suggested letters in front of IT, you should at least consider flipping the order of those two letters to match their commonly exclaimed excuse of “technically impossible” .
The Blog About Fog 