valid-date?
I've just been to my online bank to transfer money to another bank. The website has changed, for the worst, so it took a while to figure out how to transfer money. For one thing I'm now presented with a long list of accounts to pay, many of which I haven't used for years and cancelled some time ago. I select to delete individual accounts but a message tells me that they will remain for another 12 months ... and yes, they still appear in the list, with no indication that they are in fact deleted!
So having selected the account to pay, I enter the amount and select the list option to set the date. But a calendar pops up, so I have to check what today's date is from my desktop (wouldn't it be easier to just fill in today's date by default?), and discover that today is not available. Hmm? So I type in today's date and a message pops up informing me that the date must be between 23/06/2008 and 31/12/9999. Being inquisitive, I enter 21/06/9999 and a message informs me that I must make sure funds are available on that date .... some 7991 years hence!
I am annoyed that I cannot transfer money today, annoyed with the ill conceived website and can only despair at the mindset of the system designer (or more probably the programmer - a reference to Alan's Cooper's book interesting book, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum) for allowing nonsensical dates!
Now, where's the information on how to close this bank account ....
1 Comments:
The year 9999? Now that's forward thinking for you. Perhaps the programmer had a bad experience during Y2K and decided to cover himself and every programmer until the date change over in the year 10000. Which will probably trigger an explosion in the planetary fusion reactor we build in the year 4000 causing the extermination of the human race.
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