Friday, December 15, 2017

The Good Fight

Once upon a time I could travel overseas using credit cards to pay for the necessary, and often the unnecessary, with ease. Nowadays I need to 'enable' the cards so that they will work for the period I am abroad. I'm told this is to 'protect' me, though I'd never had any problem in the past I needed protecting from. The company who issue my cards (I haven't many, and there's just one company) tell me it's easy to 'enable' my cards just by sending a message. It isn't. I followed the difficult-to-find instructions on what to put in the message with absolute exactitude and, as far as I could tell, the odd replies I received suggested the cards were not 'enabled'. 

As a result I had to spend a good thirty minutes trying to beat the customer service system, which is designed to unload masses of information and instructions irrelevant to one's needs, and find a way of actually talking to a human being to help me sort things out. The actual human being to whom I talked was very helpful and got the system to work, finally, but could give no explanation of why the easy-to-use system failed - and failed miserably.

Despite wasting a good hour of my life I feel oddly triumphant, which strongly suggests that I'm just as mad as the world of customer service.

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