The ease and convenience of the internet age - summer camp edition


Posted On: Wednesday - May 25th 2022 8:53AM MST
In Topics: 
  Curmudgeonry  Artificial Stupidity



It's never difficult to come up with our Curmudgeonry posts - just a day in the life ... In this case, my family has run into not one but two of the same instance of software-related corporate stupidity, both for summer "camps"* for our boy.

Here's the general policy that Big Big and even lots of small business operate under now: You need people that to do the person-to-person work, such as teaching and attending to the kids here, but when it comes to office, clerical, or customer service, you don't have ANYONE working there. You've got your money-making people that had the idea, you get someone to put together some software for the web that's suppose to do it all, and you just let 'er rip.

That's what we ran into. The card that advertised for the first camp had nothing but a website name on it, but no phone # and no physical address. (The name was familiar to us or I would have passed on it out of lack of trust.) I know myself well enough to know that my patience for the Artificial Stupidity has been waning over the years.

My more-patient wife (was) volunteered to get on the site and take care of this. The whole (eventually failed) process went on-and-off for weeks. She'd told me that she got stuck and had given up. I took a look at some point - I really want the kid to be able to do this - and she showed me some of the stupidity of the long web form process. It required a prefix and suffix for kids' names, for stupidity's sake! Whaaa? OK, just put in "Mr." then "Sr." - got to humor the thing, as it has no mercy, as a human being would. We got to the spot in which one paid, finally, but my wife showed me that after you submitted all that, it went back to more forms for more information entry. "Enough!", we had both exclaimed. I gave it a another week...

Finally the boy found us a physical address at least. It's very close by, as I figured from the name, so I dropped by there one morning. Two different buildings and about 4 people's help later (all of them very nice, BTW), I got to a lady who called a number upstairs that nobody answered. I was left with a phone # to bring home. Yea, now we're making progress, in this lovely computer age!

I got a live person on the line a day or so later who signed up our kid and took the payment on the phone. As for information, it was the very basics that he needed, not any more than I figured was required. 5 minutes with him beat frustrating hours on-and-off on the internet.

That was easy!



Next round: This web site let us get right up to the payments, but same thing, after we paid, it went back to a blank form. We gave up, but not before I noticed a link telling us to save our kid's info with google. I'm pretty sure things would have worked if we had, but both of us now are adamant that "NO! We are most certainly NOT giving this information to the goolag." Yeah, but you HAVE to. (Most people would just resign themselves, even that had any inkling of privacy concerns.)

Ahaa, at least there was a phone number this time. I called, and the nice lady said she'd send an email by the next evening that would help. I was not confident about said help being of use to me. The email never came anyway. I called 2 days later, and this time I made it clear that clarifying emails about the website were not what we needed. I want to simply sign up this kid.

This was quite a bit farther, but I drove down there, and the nice lady took all the info from me (quite a big more than the other place), typed it into her computer, and took my CC info for a payment. That was not quite as easy, but it's done.

With all that hassle, I'd have still been glad to have just gone to each place in person from the beginning rather than deal with the stress of automated computer programs that give no leeway. Both places came close to losing a customer, but here's the thing: How many other customers do they lose without every having any idea?


PS: What I think these companies do is get software that is very generic, made for signing up for whatever, and it's not customized for their business purpose.


* Most of what are called "camps" these days don't involve anything resembling camping, but I think that's nothing new.

Comments:
Adam Smith
Wednesday - May 25th 2022 12:37PM MST
PS: Good afternoon,

Glad to hear you (or your boy) managed to find a phone number so you could negotiate the labyrinthine sign up process. Things like this really shouldn't be so difficult. Computers are supposed to make things easier, but that is often Not the case. I hope he has fun at camp.

SafeNow, I too believe that small town folks are easier to deal with than big city bureaucrats. It's like these small towns are the last vestiges of the high trust white societies we enjoyed in the past. I like your term “aggressive apathy”. Never heard it described that way before. Thanks.

Off Topic:
I'd like to congratulate George Floyd on two years of sobriety. Cheers! 🍺

https://i.ibb.co/yk31NSg/lastsupper.jpg
https://tinyurl.com/mu7brv29

The Alarmist
Wednesday - May 25th 2022 12:19PM MST
PS

Camp Foo Bar.

Moderator
Wednesday - May 25th 2022 11:31AM MST
PS: Run-a-muck would work well for this kid, PM. (I'll delete your dupe later.)

SafeNow, we are in between, I'd say. It's nothing resembling California, put it that way. When you deal in person, it often goes pretty well, but it was getting to that stage. They don't seem to want you to.

Speaking of AL, I had to deal with highway dept. stuff there - it goes by the county, not the State as a whole, and as you wrote, real people actually answering the phone! California sounds pretty bad. I hope you get your stuff straight with the GI doc.

I can remember the 1990s when I got the Doc (Radiologist) live on the phone at the hospital, just by calling over there and asking for him. It was about a bill, not one that I wasn't going to pay, but it's just that the 1st bill I got had all this red print telling me I'm a deadbeat for not paying and pay the hell up. I told the radiologist about it directly in a pretty pissed-off manner: "Hey, listen man, it's the 1st bill I've got from you all, and they're threatening me and stuff." "OK, well, see, that's my billing department, so ..." "Tell 'em not to do that shit." I can now imagine him handing the phone back at the nurses station going "hey, you guys gotta screen out some of this ..."
SafeNow
Wednesday - May 25th 2022 10:39AM MST
PS

I think ordeals like this are much less common in small-town, Trump-voting, old-fashioned America. A while back I had occasion to deal with a small company in a small city in Alabama, and they dealt with my worries and questions with wonderful politeness and patience (after picking-up the phone after a ring or two). This was like the America I grew-up in. Now I am stuck in California. My gastro doc’s group has a secret phone number. A patient must telephone a call service, and they in turn deal with the actual medical office. I had a doctors appointment recently, and I tried to get the front desk’s phone number, but they told me, with what I call “aggressive apathy,” that it is private contact information.
possumman
Wednesday - May 25th 2022 10:35AM MST
PS Camp Run-a-muck?
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