jesus h. motherfuck!!! - can there be a more teethgrindingly frustrating experience than trying to pay a bill online with a major british company?
you’ll note i say “british company” because, strangely enough, the big US or international companies [such as ebay and paypal] that i regularly have to deal with,  seem capable of serving up a website that actually fucking works!

i’ve just spent the past two days trying to pay my phonebill online at BT’s website.  what a steaming piece of turd that sorry digital dungheap is, and no mistake!  i tried to make their putrid site work in the latest versions of the following browsers;  safari, netscrape, camino, omniweb and opera [all running on mac OSX 10,3,8] and got absolutely nowhere:

with safari and omniweb, filling in my login details and then hitting ’submit’ served me up a blank page every time.  with camino, logging in produced a blank page and an error about the ‘URL containing too many redirects’.  with netscrape, i was seemingly able to log into my account but subsequently any link i clicked on either didnae do anything, or took me to the dreaded “404 - file not found” page.  fuck’s sake! - even clicking on the “home” link produced a 404!  as for opera, i cannae remember what that did, but it was obviously so horrific i’ve banished the memory from my mind.

i did manage to get through to a contact form page using one of the browsers, and fired off an email to BT asking them WTF was wrong with their site and outlining all of the above but, needless to say i havenae been graced with a reply as yet.  mind you, when [or if] i do ever receive one, i know for a fact it’ll be along the lines of  “we recommend you use internet explorer for windows….”

no…  “i recommend you build a fucking website that complies to at least a couple of web standards and stop assuming everyone in the world uses the same fucked up hack of a browser on the same fucked up hack of an operating system”,  you cunts!

slight clue chaps - if your site’s generating URLs such as…..

https://www2.bt.com/youraccount?coexistence=true&BV_EngineID=cccdaddegfkmhddcflgcefkdffndfni.0&action=redirectLink&BV_SessioID=%40%40%40%400922545810.1113479134%40%40%40%40&targetLinkID=SR_NHP_FH_Paymybill
  …just to get to the fucking login page before the user has submitted anything and the even catchier….

https://www2.bt.com/btPortal/application;JSESSIONID_btPortalWebApp=CeXsS5KSNGVNXR9QPbN9VT728nY9V9npMpRvQY0JJBS7s9Ha36Ry!1181327016?namespace=security&origin=content.jsp&event=link.smlogin&coexistence=true&pageid=my_account&siteArea=con.mya&BV_SessionID=%40%40%40%4000296158 10.1125139134%40%40%40%40&action=redirectLink&BV_EngineID=cccdaddegfkmhddcflgcefkdffndfni.0&targetLinkID=SR_NHP_FH_Paymybill

  …. afterwards, maybe it’s time to think about using POST instead of GET in your submission forms!

i’ve also had fun’n'japes this morning trying to pay my gas bill on powergen’s website.  using safari to try and login simply kept reloading the login page over and over again.  so, once again i was forced to fire up netscrape  in order to be able to hand over my hard-earned money to these jerks.

the really annoying thing is that if i went to any of those companies asking for a job working on their website, they’d take one look at me and tell me to “shut the door on your way out”.  meantime, some dorko-corporation [which doubltess designates itself as working in "IT", pays its employees in "K" and offers its clients  "solutions"] of suit wearing geeks gets awarded contracts worth thousands upon thousands of pounds to design websites which quite patently they don’t bother even to test on any configuration of hardware and software outside of whatever’s running on the plastic windoze box on the desk in front of them!

this bilge was posted on 14 April 2005 at 02:16and is filed under bilge rants. you can follow any responses to this bilge through the RSS 2.0 feed. you can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.