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Day 4,
Today is going to be a busy day which I will perhaps talk
more about tomorrow, but for now I would like to have a
rant...
Annoying Services...
#1 The electricity company I am signed up to
is pretty good, and this is not necessarily only them doing
this because all are obliged to encourage their customers to
switch to a smart meter, which I have ranted about before.
I, of course, have opted out of this in various ways but
recently a new tactic was employed...
I mean, there clearly can't be any benefit
to me from having the smart meter, they're no long trying to
sell me on how it will save me electricity, or money
(because it wont), instead they're just trying to tempt me with
perks for having one installed, it's like when people were
being offered a donut to get a Covid jab. Thanks, but no.
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#2 One of the banks I'm with then annoyed me
when I signed in to their website. Like the electricity
company pushing smart meters, they've been pushing their
customers to go paperless with regards to bank statements.
This is all well and good; the routine has just been to
sometimes present me with an option when I sign in to update
my preference; I just click a box and continue on in to my
account - I prefer paper statements because I feel better
able to check off my transactions against my accounts and
keep track of my spending*. Now, however, I signed in and
then in order to proceed I was presented with this...
Notice the lack of option to stick with
paper statements? There wasn't one. And in reality this page
was a lot longer because they listed all of "the benefits"
to going paperless and the "Continue..." button was below
all of that.
Now, if I had just walked into my "local
branch" (admittedly not that easy to do since they're all
mostly closed), and then when I approached the counter and
presented my ID, to be immediately told "We've now switched
you over to paperless statements, if you want to switch back
you'll have to go and see Julie upstairs, first door
on the right and she will handle your request..." before
dealing with what I went in there to do, that would be...
well, I would say something regarding how stupid that is.
In this event I followed their steps and
promptly opted back in to receive my bank statements by
mail. The only issue now is I received a prompt email
confirming I'd opted in to go paperless, but not one
confirming I'd then opted out... If it turns out to be a
problem and my paper statements now cease, or they pull this
trick again, I will be having a word with them.
*I think banks actually prefer customers to
not keep good track of their spending since this can lead to
more getting over-drawn and thus incur fees.
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#3 Ebay is also a little annoying in various
ways, and I mean as a platform and ignoring the issues
people have with the sellers or buyers. The issue I have is
ebay make it pretty much impossible to talk to anyone about
a problem with the platform (if you have a problem with
regards to a transaction then you can generally jump through
the various hoops that have been put in place to get things
resolved, but to talk to a person at ebay? Not on your nelly.
It's almost as if they think there could never be such a
problem.
The problem I've had recently is that I have
a few "saved searches" that I have put into a HTML file on
my desktop, like when I was looking for a car I set up my
search criteria (distance willing to travel, price range
etc.) and then saved the URL of the search results, so I
could easily repeat my search on another day (I think there
is a way to do this within the platform itself, but I like
my way). This has always worked well, except some of the
categories have now started to load very slowly...
Eventually I realised why this was
happening. The slow categories have multiple pictures loaded
in the "background" for each item and there are arrows that
appear on the picture when you put your mouse over them so
you can navigate through those pictures without loading the
full listing. I first realised there was something odd when
I noticed something akin to a progress bar beneath each
image, taking up real-estate on my screen. I now realise
this bar indicates how many images there are for the listing
and whereabouts you are if you navigate through them.
It's all an annoying "feature" for me that
does nothing but cause the page to pretty much fail to load
at all. I'd grown quite fond of having a half-hour scroll
through ebay to see what was newly listed in a given
section.
As I say, this doesn't affect all sections,
so it's like this is something ebay are rolling out, perhaps
targeting certain sections first... but I have no way of
reaching out to them to point out the problem; "This does
not work / or it's terribly slow for someone like me without
super-fast internet). I have looked around for a related
setting with no luck.
However, since this has made my ebay
browsing experience unpleasant, this has actually put me off
having a browse each day... which might actually be a good
thing (for me) since I got quite addicted to it a while
back. Sorry ebay, you're now missing out on sales.
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To end on a positive service note; I
recently had to chat online with someone about my phone
service as I was unable to opt back in to the deal I was on
(it's actually annoying that I have to contact them to do
this, but their website or phone options don't give me the
ability to do this), but this is beside my point; the chat
went smoothly (once I'd got past the initial bot that
thankfully quickly directed me to an actual human) and I was
left a happy customer - I had worried they no longer had the
deal I had been using and the service was going to cost me
more and therefore I'd be obliged to go elsewhere.
The communication went so well that at the
end when they asked "Is there anything else I can help you
with?" I said, "Well actually, yes..." and requested a
replacement sim card because my phone has an old one that
will not fit a new phone. I therefore am a step closer to
getting a smartphone... (something I talked about
this time last year!) but
perhaps more on this on another day.
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