Oh those pet peeves

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Newbie
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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Newbie » Mon May 11, 2020 2:51 pm

As a supervisor, I can see how many calls are in the different queues, including the "supervisor inquiry" queue that only has me and three other people receiving from it. I do NOT have the ability to designate WHICH queue I want to receive a call from; the Supervisor Inquiry queue takes precedence as long as a call is in that queue , but if the agent hangs up in the moment between when I decide to press the Available button and when my button-press is registered by the system, I get the next call in any available queue in the system, which may very well be 45 minutes of walking octogenarians through the features of their cell phone web browser, rather than completing supervisor approvals or addressing escalated calls.

What's worse is when we have high call volume like this and an agent decides to call me directly--I hear the chirp that someone called, but there's no way for me to tell if they're still waiting once I finish with my current call five or ten minutes later. I can risk going available to help them, but if they got their issue resolved or lost patience and hung up, I'm right back in the general call queue, processing compromised accounts and troubleshooting Quicken DirectConnect for 30 minutes at a time.
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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Mongrel » Mon May 11, 2020 3:02 pm

Wow. Having worked in my share of call centres in my time, goddamn that is an amazingly badly designed system.
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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Thad » Sun May 17, 2020 11:46 pm

Memo to web developers:

If you are using JavaScript to do something that could be done with an <a> or <img> or any other tag that appears in the first chapter of an introduction to web development, you're doing it wrong.

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mharr
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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby mharr » Wed May 20, 2020 5:46 am

Apparently the clothing warehouse shop Matalan offer the 'chance' to win a hundred quid's store credit if you take the time to review your purchases, which is probably bullshit but whatever. Then the review page requests you turn off ad blocking to post your review. Not 'whitelist our site', turn off all ad blocking entirely. Sure enough the review fails to post if you just allow matalan.co.uk through.

So now we know what the 'review' page is actually for and isn't this a nice responsible thing to be encouraging.

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Thad » Mon May 25, 2020 6:17 pm

In all seriousness and with no hyperbole whatsoever: one of the most important skills in programming is being able to write a good error message.

I was setting up a new cable modem for a family member (social distancing note: nobody is living there; it's the vacant house I spent a couple nights at when my AC died), because they wanted to stop paying the monthly rental fee to Cox.

I went through all the steps to set it up, and got to an error message that said "This device is not supported by Cox." (It then had a link purportedly to a list of supported devices. The link didn't work. I'm not clear on whether that was a programming error or a logic one -- ie, was it a link to a site I couldn't access because my modem wasn't activated?)

So I boxed the modem back up, reconnected the Cox rental, and headed home, intending to call my family member and tell them to return the modem I'd recommended they buy, and I'd figure out where I'd gone wrong and find another model to recommend.

Only I got to thinking, dammit, I definitely remember I did my research on this and it said it would work with Cox, and it even had a tech support number for Cox printed on the back of its manual. So I decided to hold off and do more research before suggesting they return it.

So I come home, find Cox's list of compatible devices, and it was on there.

So today I went back over there and called Cox. Now, I'll say one thing -- this was the best customer support experience with Cox I've ever had. No hold time at all; I did have to go through menu hell, but as soon as I finally got to the "talk to a representative" prompt, I got right through with no wait. And after the preliminaries, address, account PIN, etc., the rep saw the problem right away; she just had to switch something on her end to say that we would be supplying our own modem instead of using the rental. It was totally straightforward; I wound up having to reboot the modem a couple times, but it worked fine after that.

So, on the one hand, all's well that ends well.

But on the other hand, I came very close to having a family member return a working modem and pay a restocking fee, then spending more time researching modems to find a new one to recommend, then having my family member order it and wait for it to arrive, and then going back over there, setting it up, and hitting the same goddamn problem, all because some incompetent was too liberal with the "This device is not supported by Cox" error message.

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Mongrel » Wed Aug 05, 2020 7:35 pm

You know, after 20 years or whatever it's been, you'd think Steam could AT LEAST manage to not have 10-20 minute (or longer) disconnections once every 2-3 days (or more often), if not multiple times per day. And I know it's not me, because it happens to pretty much everyone else I know who uses Steam chat or the Steam workshop, or any of the other community elements of Steam frequently. We're just so used to it that we're all stupidly inured to it "Oh... sorry I disappeared. Steam shit the bed as usual."

I mean your games still work during these outages, even multiplayer ones of course - if THAT failed as often, Steam would be bankrupt - and I expect most users don't give much of a shit past that. But the client seems less stable than Trump doing speedballs, and it's fucking embarrassing.
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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Thad » Mon Aug 24, 2020 6:07 pm

Prepaid debit cards are, inevitably, a pain in the ass.

This past week, the company I work for sent me a $50 gift card for my work anniversary. My work anniversary was April 1, but I get it; back then they were figuring everybody would be back in the office by now.

But I can't use the fucking thing. I'm sure I could if I went to a store and somebody swiped it through a magnetic card reader. But everywhere I've tried to enter it online has asked for a billing address. There's no billing address on the card, on the letter that came with it, or on the website. I've tried my company's address and I've tried my address. They don't work.

I can't say this makes me feel terribly valued as an employee. Whatever bulk discount the company gets that makes gift cards a more cost-effective solution than just writing me a fucking check, I'd rather just take the hit; I'd rather have $40 in my bank account than a piece of plastic that says it's worth $50 but which I have no practical way of exchanging for goods or services.

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Caithness
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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Caithness » Mon Aug 24, 2020 7:16 pm

You could sell it for $42.50 on ebay, if you still trust the USPS to get it to the buyer.

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Niku » Mon Aug 24, 2020 7:26 pm

I recently got a restaurant gift card mailed to me as repayment for missing items in a delivery order, and said restaurant does not allow you to input their gift cards on their payment services for delivery orders.
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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Thad » Mon Aug 24, 2020 7:27 pm

Caithness wrote:You could sell it for $42.50 on ebay, if you still trust the USPS to get it to the buyer.


I think I successfully signed up for Sparky's List with it, but it's hard to tell because I haven't gotten the confirmation e-mail I'm supposed to.

That still leaves $10 I'm going to have to figure out how to spend on it, because Sparky's List is $20 a year and this thing expires in 2 years. Which, y'know, is one of those other things that makes these fucking things much worse than a check.

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Thad » Tue Sep 01, 2020 7:06 pm

The paging on monoprice.com uses blue text for the currently-active page and black for the links to the other pages.

WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS
WHY

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Thad » Sat Sep 26, 2020 12:18 pm

There are a lot of really terrible trends in web design, but I think gray text against a white background might just be the worst.

I really should just make a custom CSS file that's just body { color: black; } and set it as the default for every website. Occasionally I'd hit a light-on-dark site and have to disable it, but probably a fuck of a lot less frequently than I find myself opening up the debug panel just to change a site's text color.

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Thad » Sat Sep 26, 2020 2:11 pm

Decided to check and see if there's an extension to handle that; found Blacken, which seems to do the job.

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby François » Sat Oct 24, 2020 11:25 am

My Internet connection goes down for twenty minutes, I restart my modem, then my router, then repeat several times, no dice.

I call my ISP's tech support, the guy tells me to restart my modem, then my router, and my connection instantly goes back up.

I bet the Germans have a word for this feeling.

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby beatbandito » Sat Oct 24, 2020 1:16 pm

Fwiw they probably also reestablished the connection on their end too when they asked to you restart the modem, and it wasn't just circumstances making you look a fool.
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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Silversong » Sun Oct 25, 2020 4:18 pm

I've been getting 1 to 4 political spam texts every day for the past two weeks. I looked it up and apparently as long as they aren't using an auto dialer it's totally legal and there's no Do Not Text list. I'm so pissed about this. Almost pissed enough to spend the 15 minutes each it would take to report each one as an FCC complaint.

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby nosimpleway » Sun Oct 25, 2020 6:17 pm

Tell 'em you don't live in the district anymore.

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Thad » Sun Nov 01, 2020 2:00 pm

Screws are a pain in the ass. They're easy to lose, they're easy to strip, they come in a shitload of different sizes and it can be hard to figure out which size goes back in which hole. It's completely understandable why so many case designs try to minimize the number of screws you have to deal with.

But if your alternative to screws is "let's use stupid little plastic tabs instead", you're doing it wrong.

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby beatbandito » Sun Nov 01, 2020 2:19 pm

Also: all screws being hex-head or square-indent if it needs to be flush would remove about 90% of screw issues.
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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Thad » Mon Nov 02, 2020 12:26 am

Yeah, that too. There's a reason furniture and heavy exercise equipment are all put together with hex screws.

Well, two reasons, really. They don't strip, and you can put a lot more leverage into turning an Allen wrench than a screwdriver.

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