On the heels of my earlier post about inaccurate computer error messages, here’s a rant about deliberately misleading ones.
Upon trying to pay bills via Washington Mutual’s web site today:
Portions of our Web site are temporarily unavailable due to regularly scheduled maintenance.Either the people in the IT shop are idiots for scheduling maintenance in the middle of a business day, or the site is down not for “regularly scheduled maintenance” but because of problems. Either way, the company looks bad.
I hate it when companies aren’t forthcoming about problems. Airlines are probably the worst, but the “It’s not our fault something is wrong” mentality is pretty pervasive. The Consumerist web site, for example, recently posted a customer’s complaint about Comcast wherein the local office repeatedly claimed they had no system problems yet the customer had spoken with a line worker in his neighborhood who explained he was working on “system problems.”
In the case of Washington Mutual’s web site, I spoke with a customer service rep who explained that the site had indeed been down for “regular maintenance” on Sunday but they had problems getting it back up. It’s been down now for several days, but is still reporting that it’s just a routine outage. In the meantime, I can’t pay bills that are due in a few days.
To her credit, the customer service rep got permission from her manager to set up the bill payments for me. I can’t imagine, however, that I’m the only person who has called in about this. If they were really on top of things, they would have immediately offered such support, or even added an option to their obnoxious phone menu: “Press 6 if you need to pay bills and cannot access our web site.”
