New horizons in stupidity

[redbird]

Air Canada has a reservations computer system that asks for email addresses, so they can send out confirmation emails.

The sanity check was written by a deranged prairie lizard: it rejected my standard address as too short. In the process, it threw away the already-entered credit card information as well. Since I own my own domain, I was able to get around it by inventing a new address on the spot (alternatively, I suspect my @ livejournal dot com address would have worked), but the reservations agent told me that last week he'd hit the same problem with a long-time AOL user who had a three-character userid.

My "real" email address--the one that everything else forwards to--is a two-character username.

(We'll just gloss over the fact that I was doing this by phone because the Web booking system fell over and insisted that I must specify a gender for my "advance passenger information," even though I'd done so--and then timed out rather than processing the reservation without that information, an option it explicitly offers.)

I'm just hoping none of these poor excuses for computer programmers is anywhere near the airplanes.

Comments

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I've noted the forms that send you back if you didn't fill in something correctly without making clear, or at least not listing in an obvious spot, what you didn't do. And then when you correct it, it bounces you back again because on redisplay it erased some of your other data without your noticing it.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Did you try to register a credit card with Barnes & Noble too?

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Airline reservations, mostly.

[ala-too.livejournal.com]

It could be worse. You could have had to deal with United Airline's horrific system for tracking down lost luggage. The darn thing cannot understand me at all. Then when it times out after 15 minutes of saying silly things like "Did you mean Tokoyo" when you've said "Boston" it insists that there is no agent available to help at the moment (even if you call for hours at a time) and hangs up.

Then there is the US Air system which now has a credit card hold to guarantee a ticket price. Only when you put a ticket on hold it decides to charge you for the ticket every 2 hours (yes, this really happened to me!).

As someone who spent a dozen years as a programmer I know these aren't hard tasks to get right. If all else fails get a human on the line. That's just not hard to make happen. This is just poor programming.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

The software design rules for avionics is enormously different than the software design rules for everything else.

B

Question

[zorinth.livejournal.com]

Did you check to see if Air Canada has been aquired by Microsoft?

Re: Question

[redbird]

If it had, they'd have tried to convince me that it was supposed to do that.