Ah, IT. Just gotta love ‘em.
I recently signed up for a ride-hailing app for my smart phone. (Not really important which one because they’re all pretty much the same.) The reason it took so long is because these things are pretty much unknown in Germany. When Uber first came out with ride-hailing in Germany in 2014, the taxi lobby fought against it. Hard. By March of the following year, Uber was essentially banned by the courts because they couldn’t (read: didn’t want to) guarantee that all its drivers had the necessary chauffeur’s license and the app was similarly outlawed in 2019 because it bypassed the regulated taxi companies. Even though most (all?) Uber rides have long been handled by real, regulated cabs anyway, Uber and the like have never really recovered from these decisions to have any sort of presence in Germany. Apps do exist to hail cabs, and some of them apparently even work out in the wastelands of Not-Bielefeld, but in the end you have to pay official taxi rates with no possibility of searching for a better deal.
Anyway …
Sometimes I’m not in Germany so I thought that I’d finally take the plunge for when I needed a ride in another country. As a welcome bonus for signing up, I got an e-mail today offering me a “10% discount on your next 1 scheduled rides!”. Ok, it’s bad enough that a singular somehow became a plural, but look closer and you can see that the offer expired on “1995-08-17T12:16:38.722+00:00”. Or, to give it a little more context, precisely 29 years, 3 days, 22 hours, 23 minutes, and 29.278 seconds before I received the e-mail and to a long lost time when e-mail and even the internet were really only starting to become a thing.
Lotta lazy IT going on here …
We’ll charitably ignore the seriously flubbed expiry date (which could just be a glitch), but not even bothering to convert the time to something that a human can read and understand? And with the appropriate degree of precision? When was the last time anyone who wasn’t shooting an assassination attempt (with a camera …) ever bothered to count down to a thousandth of a second? Especially for an offer that expired nearly 30 years previously? (For the nerds out there, that’s a difference of about 10 billion orders of magnitude in precision!)
Yep, welcome to the bonehead coding of the day …
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