Nothing frustrates me more than a web site that fails to work when you really want it to. Last night I finally called SprintPCS to get my cell phone number changed to New York Metro (instead of Detroit Metro), After about two hours of continually being on hold and then disconnected, I got through to a customer service representative. Because I’m also getting a new phone and giving my brother my old one, I needed to upgrade my service plan and order a new phone. You’d think that I would be be able to do all of these things either through a single web site or using a single customer service agent. Nope. While I was waiting for the CSR’s computers to retrieve my account data from any one of them remote databases, I continually received “Server Too Busy” errors from their overloaded [and crappy] ASP-backed e-commerce web site. Ugh.
The bottom line is that in order to get the 6 month trial of web services through my cell phone, I have to order online. This is fine except for these problems:
- Since a CSR updated my account info and re-programmed my old phone with a new number, I am unable to log into my account online until their databases synchronize
- Their crappy ASP-backed web site keeps returning a “Server Too Busy” message. I first noticed this way back in July when I ordered my first phone from them
Understand that I’m not upset at Sprint or their cell phone service. What I’m pissed about is spending almost three hours on the phone and then being told that I needed to order through their web site, and then not even being able to do that becuase their web site failed to work properly.
Freshmeat: The Client as the Server
Here’s the story of a high school biology teacher who claims to have started the Rocket Car urban legend. Fascinating. [via my old friend Matt.]
Those wacky kids at 37Signals have done an excellent parody of sound-alike dot-com companies. The sad thing about Enormicom.com is that I could drop the last slide off this site, shop it around New York City, and have VCs lining up at the door in droves. I remember this great article at Salon about company naming. It somehow puts it all in perspective.
Argo/UML is an open source project attempting to provide an object oriented tool for software designers that provides cognitive support. It sounds pretty cool.
Posted by Cameron Barrett at April 18, 2000 01:49 PM