Frustration Online Every time I get involved with some issue with an internet provider it seem to turn into a complete hassle. The first thing I usually have problems with is the instructions, they never seem to be clear, or they are old and things they say to do have changed. I spent a couple of hours today trying to change a simple thing, which was one of my email addresses. I got on line and went to my account and sure enough there was no instructions there on how to do it and no way to click on the email address to enter a new one. Next thing I did was go to the help section and look for instructions. There was a set of instructions telling me about over 25 steps I would have to take to do this. Can you believe it, just to change an email address? I printed out the instructions which started out by telling me what screen to go to first, which I did. The second step was look for the cog which stands for settings. There was no cog anywhere on the page. I reloaded the page several times to see if it just didn’t come up for some reason, but there just was no cog on the page. I then went to a settings button I found while scrolling through different pages and that had no email settings. I was starting to feel very annoyed by this time so I figured I had to call the sight for help. Anyone who thinks that solved my problem is wrong. First of all, I got someone who hardly spoke English. She was very nice, but I had a very hard time communicating with her. The final outcome was she said I have to go to the account page to change my email address, the page I had reloaded so many times where the cog never appeared. I actually gave up at that point after about 2.5 hours of work. It just wasn’t worth it. I have read many horror stories of people trying to correct mistakes on sites, having been charged too much for an item, trying to exchange items and even getting charged for items they never received. Thank goodness it doesn’t happen much, but when it does it can be so frustrating. It has been this way ever since the internet was established. I remember trying to download a piece of software in what I call the old days. This was when the internet was very young and when you went online it was with an extremely slow telephone modem. I tried for days to download this program leaving my computer running all night, but things kept happening to break the connection. Today we could download a program this size almost instantly, because those programs were a lot smaller than the ones today. Sometimes something unexpected happens which can affect you. How many times have you hit a wrong button on the screen? Maybe a button that stated Hit To Purchase? I have done it a couple of times. I remember once I was using the mouse on a sellers site and I sneezed. As I sneezed my hand moved the mouse and I hit a button that I didn’t want to. I no longer remember what happened, but I do remember I had a hard time undoing whatever I did. I always use a credit card when purchasing anything. This has saved me from fraud a couple of times over the years. I remember scouring the internet for the best price on a television. I found a store site which had the lowest price listed for what I wanted and ordered it. The amount was deducted from my credit card and I waited for the television to be delivered. I waited a few days but never received an email about the delivery so I decided to go to the site and get their phone number. To my despair they didn’t have one listed. The did have an email address listed however, so I sent them an email. There was no response, so I sent one more, but still no response. That was when I called the credit card company and cancelled the payment. You have to wonder if this was a scam, they would realize there was no money to be made because of people cancelling payments? All I can think of is maybe the occasional customer doesn’t cancel the payment, but that doesn’t seem to make sense. One of my favorite stories has to do with me not taking what I am told as gospel when dealing with a sales rep. I bought a printer from Amazon and they sent it to me. So far so good. A couple of weeks later I received a second one. I immediately called Amazon and told them what happened and the representative told me I got lucky and could keep the second one for free. Well, I didn’t believe that for one second so I left the second one in the box and didn’t open it and sure enough received a bill for it. I called Amazon, told them what happened and they said to just send the second one back and provided a post free label. If something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Sometimes just getting back on the internet after it has gone down can be a bigger problem than it should be. My provider is pretty good and I don’t go down very much. I have told this story before. My provider decided everyone had to get a new cable modem. It was free, so that was no big deal. The big deal was it wouldn’t connect to the internet. I have been dealing with internet technology before there was home computers. I am telling you this so you know I am not a novice at these things. I tried for hours to connect and did everything I know, but had no luck. Finally, I called the company and got the tech department and eventually they asked me if I registered the modem with them first. I couldn’t believe it had to be registered since there was no instructions stating this. They registered it and things were fine after that. The failure to have proper instructions cost me hours and it still happens today. Proper instructions which conform to what is online are so important and when changes are made to interfaces the instructions should be updated. It is a simple thing and can save hours of useless work.
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