outbreak

On this years april fools a weird thing happened. Our fridge tried to pull a joke on us and died. Except it wasn’t a joke – it really died. Full of food. I should remind you that it was Saturday. To cut a long story short we went out and bought a new one on the same day.

The first shock was that it was not possible to deliver it on the same day. Not even if we paid. No sorry or anything, just an authorative answer that their delivery service is only possible during weekdays. Annoying. The next surprise was that the delivery service only delivers when normal people are at work. Makes sense if you’re the delivery guy, but completely no sense if you’re not. You have to take time off (which costs money) to be there when they come. They did offer to call half an hour before delivery which is a point for them though.

So I left work to welcome them in to a prepared working space – I moved the furniture and removed the rugs. All this to make it easier for them to carry the new fridge in. Needless to say we even threw our old one out by ourselves. Unfortunately there was no “them”. There was only one guy – the driver. No fuss, I overexpected. Stupid me, its a free service! Or maybe stupid them – they could have sold us delivery if there were two of them and they’d carry it in. They never even tried. To substantiate on this – I had money prepared to tip them if they brought the damn thing in. The guy said that they deliver ‘to the building’. I’d never sign the delivery papers if they left it in front of the building. Later I heard some companies use the term free transport for the same (evil) thing.

To sum things up – we would have paid for a better service but nobody offered it. I still can’t decide if I should attribute this to the fact that such service is not feasible, to the stupidity of the company or to the ignorance of the whole nation.

A few years back I was in London. Before I left Ljubljana I bought the plane tickets on Ryanair.com (link removed due to Terms and Conditions of the website) and made a reservation at the hostel. Since there were many of us going I booked for all of us. We all know that RyanAir tickets get more expensive over time so I bought them early. Of course all of this was charged to my credit card.

About a month later I landed in London got unpacked and went sightseeing. After that I went shopping. I was surprised to realize that my credit card was maxed out. My mistake – didn’t check how they charge – and theirs for not clearing it when they said they would. The point is I solved all this with two phone calls to the customer service. They were a bit annoying at first but after I provided some data about the shopping I did it was ok. The next day I could buy the book I wanted to. When I came home I changed my account limit and got another credit card.

Recently this happened again. As it was only the beginning of the month I had no idea why I’d be maxed out. No problem at the store – I just offered my other credit card. Since I couldn’t get to a computer in a decent time I decided to call the customer service. I was not shocked to hear a prerecorded message telling me to press 1 if I wanted this, 2 if I wanted that and so on. I waited for what I wanted and nothing came up. Silence. I hung up. I called again later and pressed something that vaguely resembled what I wanted from them. They told me I’d have to wait for two minutes and I told them to shove it and hung up again. I was pissed the first time it happened; now I was furious. And I’m changing banks.

There are two important points to this story. The first one is that you should really think how to word your navigation items. If people don’t know where to find what they’re looking for they’ll go somewhere else. Don’t try to jam everything in one word and don’t write essays for menu items (remember, nobody reads on the web). Make sense, test and retry until you find a good solution.

The other point is that there’s always a way to make things worse. Bureaucracy is one way to go. Bad software is another one. Thinking about yourself instead of your customers yet another. Thinking about costs where you really shouldn’t might be another one. There’s too many to add here. Maybe I’ll start compiling a list. You can help in the comments.