efficiency dis-connected!
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed for our latest posts of weekend ideas and more.
I went to pay my broadband bill today. There were 11 people ahead of me, so I waited and waited. After an eternity, my number was called.
I told the lady I wanted to pay but that I’d misplaced the current bill so could she please check my outstanding balance?
She told me she couldn’t check for me (even though there was a monitor right there on her desk that she’d been hammering at all morning!) and that I had go back out to the front desk to have them print my statement first.
I stared at her in disbelief! I was very tempted to ask her what her computer was for. Aren’t we way past the age of standalones now? Or are the computers of a phone company not connected to a network?
But then I figured if I hung around waiting for her answers to be constructed into sentences in her spotty English, I might still be there come dinner time tonight.
So I decided to move on to the next logical question. So after the front desk prints out my statement, I can pay there without getting back in line here?
She said, no, I must bring the statement back to her because the front desk can’t accept payments. Why does her answer not surprise me?
I get to the front desk and ask for my statement. A few clicks later, the guy tells me he can’t print my statement because the company has recently merged the phone and internet bills into one. So there is no breakdown for just the internet bill alone.
So in a nutshell, what they’ve got is a payment counter that can’t check outstanding amounts, and a statement counter that can’t accept payments and can’t check for balance outstanding, except if it’s a combined figure for phone and internet.
Wow, that sounds like one heck of an efficient system!
September 27th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
[...] efficiency dis-connected! [...]