Clue by Fours & Surreality

[dcseain]

Here is one of the reasons i adore my friends:

loreleisays: are you still getting a kitten?
dcseain: yeah, i think i've settled on the tabby female
loreleisays: hmph
dcseain: :)
loreleisays: you need a boyfriend, not a cat
dcseain: ur right, tho a cat won't hurt.
loreleisays: i am so sorry
loreleisays: that was mean
dcseain: NP
dcseain: ur right

They call it as they see it, if not always in the nicest way. But i totally respect straightforwardness, and need in-my-face things like that sometimes. I can be a bit (or more than a bit) flighty at times, after all. And such was the clue by four, if happily in this case, one which i already knew.


As for the surreal, i paid my wireless bill today. I paid through the website, as i always do. I paid with the same Visa debit card i've been paying the bills with for some years now. I went to the payments section, chose one-time payment, as i always do. That screen defaults to Visa, so i filled in my card number, as i always do, and then clicked next cause that’s how it works. I then presented me with the receipt screen, and the message

“Thank you! Your Star payment has been successfully submitted and will be posted to your account in approximately 4 hours. Please print this page for your records.”

It showed my payment amount; my name; card number, mostly masked; a card expiration date of 13 days ago; and a confirmation number. The transaction cleared my bank as a Visa transaction within minutes. Four hours later, SprintPCS credited my account. I called Customer Service, and their system did not show how i had paid, just that i had paid x amount. I asked why was it all so not like usual, and why did it not ask for neither an expiry nor a PIN number. Spoke with four people, one in Customer Service, one in Trouble Department, one in Billing, one in Finance .

First dude, in Customer Service, couldn’t answer my questions, but said i could have an additional phone with separate phone number for free. Fine, send me the phone. The nice woman in Trouble couldn’t help me with billing, so sent me to a dude in Billing, who didn’t seem to under stand my questions of why did the site not ask me how to process the payment, why did it say Star transaction and not Visa transaction, why is the expiry 13 days ago, and why does your system not know how i paid.

So he sent me to Finance, who told me it went thru as a Visa transaction, which agrees with what my bank thinks. He could not tell me why the weird message, nor why their Customer Service system knew not how i paid, nor why my receipt shows an expiry of 13 days ago. So i sighed, thanked him, told him i would just accept that it all worked, and they agree with my bank, and i’d just take it on faith that i hit a major burp in the system. I think i left him confused, and he’ll probably laugh about it with his peers. Ah, well. Heh. All in all, it was a best possible experience with SprintPCS.

Comments

[ksatyr.livejournal.com]

Now, I'm not a web programmer, but I have one or two insights into how client server systems work, and I suspect that the system your cell phone comapany uses is such. My guess would be that they're attempting to add a new payment method, and in doing so their front end client (web site) was updated before their backend servers were, though not entirely so, otherwise the transaction would not work at all.

Generally speaking each item in any list is given an enumerated value (usually a sequential number, but not always) so, for example, if the payment methods were Unselected, Tomatoes, Potatoes and Onions, you might have 0, 1, 2 and 3. If I insert a new type, say Capsicum as the first valid entry in the list, but don't update everything (it sneaks in to some part of the front end "success" message in your case) then everything would be off by 1 and it'd display Potatoes if you selected Onions. As payment methods involve different data, the valid data you supplied was displayed back to you in different places and with different meaning, so the date you were shown may well have been from part of your credit card number or some such.

A web site isn't all that different from a traffic system after all ;)

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

Your points are valid. However, i work for a company that makes software that allows for real-time processing of transactions, whatever their type. Bank of America, for example, uses our software to instanly post debit transactions to users' accounts, and to the web interface to the accounts.

I've little patience for poor customer service, tho my expectations for customer service from Sprint are so low that it requires very little effort on their part to leave me not unsatisfied.

They should better integrate their financial, customer service, and web interfaces. Sheesh. It's not that hard, nor terribly expensive. hmph.

[red-lynx.livejournal.com]

tho a cat won't hurt.

Cats and boyfriends are not interchangeable. For one thing, cats are a lifelong commitment (the cat's lifetime). Boyfriends may be, but a boyfriend does not need you to take him to the vet, feed him, scoop his litter etc.

This having been said, cats are not strictly speaking dependants. There is some mysterious kind of partnership that goes on.

While a cat might be good for you, I don't think it is a good idea to get one because you don't currently have a boyfriend. Even though they're both cuddly ;)

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

Sometimes life would be easier of cats and boyfriends were interchangeable. Tho frankly, if my current feline familiar were a bf, he'd've been out on his arse long ago. The random fits of crawl into lap, purr, then bite and claw to draw blood on being touched are not welcome.

Happily, now that he's pushing 14, he's chilled some and such outbursts are less common.