OT don't make it harder for customers to do business with you

Investment Analysis Clubs Macro Economic Trends and Risks
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I mentioned before my (former) favorite Wendy’s has had…“challenges” for the last couple years. I finally got into their newly remodeled dining room a week ago and had one of their new chicken wraps (very tastey). Filled out the on-line survey offered on the back of the receipt, and headed back for my free sandwich. Walked in and there was a sign on the register “use the kiosk”. Since the plague, their human cashiers have not known how to ring up the free sandwich for the survey. I am not going to fight with the stupid kiosk. Spun around and left.

Walked back in another day. Sign still on the register “use the kiosk”. Looked at the kiosk. The screen said “the terminal is out to lunch, see one of the people at the counter”, of which there were none. Fortunately, my lungs work well “HEY!” A human arrived at the counter and took my order (still didn’t know how to ring it up, and couldn’t make change because there was no money in the register) Finally got my sandwich and chowed down. As I was leaving, there was a guy with a Wendy’s shirt on, working on the terminals. I admonished him “don’t make it hard for people to do business with you”.

Now, I told you that story to tell you this one.

About a month ago, I was locked out of my AT&T U-Verse home page. The page is demanding a cell phone number, to text me a code to unlock the home page. No alternative is offered. Cell number and text, or the customer is stuffed. I spent an extended time on the voice line with support, Finally got to a tech, who assured me it was some foul-up on their end, and it would be corrected shortly. A month has passed. It isn’t fixed. Fortunately, I’m really old, and use an e-mail client (Thunderbird), as I have for 25 years, so I don’t need to get in to their home page to check my e-mail. And I am NOT going to pay for a cell phone from them, to get the text message, to access the home page I am paying for.

Of course, there is an upside to AT&T’s incompetence. I have been considering moving. I didn’t like changing ISP, due to having to change all the places that I receive e-mails from to a different address. Due to T’s incompetence, I’m changing my preferences on those sites anyway.

…except I haven’t changed my e-mail on the Fool yet. Tried to, but their settings menu appears to be busticated too.

…quality of service is such a “burden”…it hurts profits.

Steve

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I’ve been dealing with AT&T’s mess for quite a while, we once had their DSL service, dropped it after Comcast took over our local private CATV system, but along the way we had a lot of the pacbell.net addresses out there… Had problems getting initially Entourage, then Outlook and even Apple’s Mail to sign onto the pacbell.net accounts… They pawned it off to Yahoo so it becomes a circular mess attempting to even logon to event he online account. Over a long time, I’ve moved the vitals away from at&t’s control, still a few, and I have gotten into he online Yahoo access page for myself and DW, there were thousands of backed up spam and trash to clear out, unsubscribe from most, etc… I gave up on trying to make it work with Outlook or Mail, just go in, clean it out whenever I feel like wasting some time… It’s just weird, the same login/password that gets me into he online access isn’t accepted on either email client where the rest live… And because I’m no longer an at&t DSL customer, there is also no customer support, even if I wanted to try again… They do not want to access their services… Silly business model…

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I still have an SBCGlobal.net e-mail address. Thunderbird has always worked well on it. Funny thing, from the "Currently/Yahoo/AT&T site, I can log into my personal page and do things of interest to T, like pay my bill, but can’t log in to my personal settings for the home page.

Even more interesting, some sites want a backup e-mail addy. So, I was using an AOL e-mail account…until one site wanted to send a verification code to the AOL account. AOL’s log in is busticated tonight. I tried to log in to my AT&T home page, to do a screen capture of the screen I get demanding a cell phone number, except, tonight, T’s Yahoo page log in is busticated too. Do AOL and T/Yahoo both use the cheapest back room in the world, some shop on Gavabutu? Interesting that both log-in screens would fail at the same time.

…because acceptable quality of service puts an unacceptable burden on profits.

Steve

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That is why I have my own web site (for e-mail forwarding). That way, no need to log in to their system unless their system fails. As it is easy to check if their e-mail forwarding is working, I send myself a test e-mail from another address (a different ISP). Been using it for many years. Few problems.

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Ah HAH! Ma Bell’s log in screen is no longer doing it’s new malfunction screen. It is now back to the malfunction screen I have been seeing for a month.

I’m not sure which is more Kafkaesque, Ma Bell locking me out of my home page, until I provide a cell phone number, as a safety against being locked out, or a sign on a Wendy’s cash register telling me to use a kiosk that is out of service and telling me to use a human cashier, which does not exist.

Screenshot 2023-04-12 at 22-01-34 Profile Information
Screenshot 2023-04-12 at 22-01-34 Profile Information476×778 57.1 KB

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Well, I gave up…I used to have an AOL email address, gave that up for the pacbell.net, I guess… If I could dig around, it might be interesting to log into that old AOL account, unless they trashed it… Used to even have my own web page on AOL and one I set up as a personal page for our local union guys, but last time I tried they couldn’t be found, so maybe that all faded away… Too many email addresses, most just spam collectors… Some friends still use their AOL email accounts, not sure who keeps them going…

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Me too! For over 20 years I have been using an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to host multiple websites and email addresses at a cost of $35 a month. They have great service, a fantastic help desk, and a real human owner.

The Captain

My first ISP was Mac based because I was using a Claris database, expensive and limiting. Decided to move to LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) at a cheap ISP that a year later went bankrupt. Next a Canadian ISP that moved from Saskatchewan to the US after the province raised their electricity prices and they misplaced the server at customs. When it was recovered it needed some repairs but being a Sun Micro server they had to expedite parts from California. Lesson learned, use only servers with the most common chips, x86. Less that 90 days later I found HTTPme.com and have been a happy customer ever since.

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I used to have my own domain www.bbsystems.com when I had my IT Systems Integration business. Created the domain in 1995 and finally migrated all email to gmail and killed my website back in 2014. I love how some of us early adopters are still hanging around :wink:

It’s great to be able to look back at how the website changed over the years. Has anyone else had a look at their website over time? Care to share?

https://web.archive.org/web/19961201000000*/www.bbsystems.com

'38Packard

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For me the most important aspect was/is the code that drives the websites. I’m no artist/designer, I was an early Mac reseller (1982?) and took to heart Apple’s Interface Guidelines which I applied to my web design. The pretty look was done by a Kiwi designer. I once asked him what font he used to write code, he replied “What’s code?”

I started with Claris FileMaker Pro which taught me relational databases. I switched to LAMP using a Claris HTML editor. As HTML progressed I switched to BBEdit which I still use today, great software that does not suck (their motto).

After experimenting a bit I started writing the backend of websites for my Kiwi designer friend. I created a PHP framework. When that became spaghettified I redid it as OOP, much better at organizing code but the websites were still poorly designed. My last iteration was a php OOP semantic (based on HTML5) framework that is working beautifully. I wish some young lad or lass would take an interest in it, at 84 I’m too old to try to take it public. How do I know it’s good? It’s easy to maintain! Perfect for Agile coding.

The Captain

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Our first website which featured a real-time order entry process way back in 1995 was called “Brad’s Vintage Car Emporium” to demonstrate to our client base that this stuff was actually real. It was initially running on an NT Server with Internet Information Server (IIS) process linked to an Access DB and coded using VB Script with active controls?

Version 2 of the order entry process was coded using a MS NT Front-end but linked to an Oracle back end. All of that was tossed when we started to work in a UNIX environment :wink:

1997-02-22 - Brads Vintage Car Emporium
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1997-02-22 - Brads Vintage Cars
1997-02-22 - Brads Vintage Cars1091×634 209 KB

'38Packard

  • it was fun to take a day off from the office and take snapshots of junk cars!!!
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ah-HAH! AOL and Yahoo are indeed the same company, sold by Verizon to a PE group a year ago. So that is why the AOL and Yahoo log in screens were busticated at the same time last night. The same company also owns CompuServe.

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Hey Steve. I’m really old too. I currently use Outlook and I’m having an issue adding a second email account to Outlook. My primary email address is with EarthLink but I would like to add my Yahoo email address as well. Since having problems adding Yahoo to Outlook I’m considering downloading Thunderbird and running two clients to accomplish the second email address need. Just wondering if you like Thunderbird? Any issues?

Regards,
ImAGolfer

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Nope. It works well. There was a help screen somewhere on the AT&T/Yahoo home page that gave the server settings, so setup was easy. Several years ago, there was a change, due to some sort of security concern, but I had received a message about it somehow, and made the change.

Before Thunderbird, I used Eudora. When Qualcomm stopped developing Eudora, they directed users to switch to Thunderbird.

Steve

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Hey ImAGolfer,

I’m not Steve and I don’t pretend to play him on TV, but I also converted from Outlook to Thunderbird way back when and have had no issues. I run MAPI clients (desktop and mobile iPhone) and have no issues syncing all of the inbox and sent messages across multiple email domains (personal and volunteering ones). If you want one client for all of your emails, and want to dump Outlook, you can also download a converter add-in that will read your Outlook mailbox(es) and dump them all into Thunderbird for you. It’s great to have all of your email in one place.

Hope that helps!
'38Packard

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@38Packard - unfortunately, I have not logged into my NetZero account in ages. Remember them guys?

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The guys who predicted the future of TV: advertising running on screen during the program, because, even though they have twice the advertising time per hour than they did 40 years ago, they want to sell even more ad time.

Steve

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Raising a hand as another happy Eudora then Thunderbird user. For many years I have handled the mail server in house with a Linux box, but I am now looking for a provider to handle it externally so that we won’t be so dependent on me personally.

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Hey 38. That’s interesting. Thanks for the tip. I’ll squirrel it away for future use.

ImAGolfer

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gmail worked for us. Free service. They read your email to target you, but that’s the price you pay for a free service that works day in and day out.

Other choices are other ISP / email provider cloud services - there are a million of them! Look for good customer service, uptime, and a nice control center to administer the services for your account.

Cheers!
'38Packard

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I’m so glad that I have my own domain name. As long as I keep renewing it every year, I don’t have to change email addresses just because I move or switch to a different Internet provider.

The domain name provider I use is Tierra.net. I cannot recall ever having any problems that involved their side of things. There’s no dirt on them, unlike the case with GoDaddy or other competitors.

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