when the non-English internet banking site you use to access all your records of payments received and money spent reconstructs their layout and design and makes you go absolutely bonkers because you have memorized all the locations of the clicks that you have to do to get to what you need on the old layout which seemed a perfectly fine working layout and you don't have any clue as to why they needed to go and change around everything, but alas they have, and none of your English speaking Korean colleagues are around to help you because it's a day before a holiday and after a weekend making you wonder what the hell you're doing at work in the first place, and then when you say, 'hey, I can figure this out, I took Korean for 5 months and anyway, if it's truly user intuitive and built for a user's perspective then any monkey should be able to find the list of recent credit card transactions for a credit card whose name is, after all, "BIG POT" (in English) – and then specify a date range and export last month's transactions to file – a kind of monthly statement of sorts – just like banking institutions offer back in the yoo ess of eh', and then you begin the clicking around, on this link and that, getting to pages that seem like dead ends and spending a few minutes looking at the Korean text here-and-there but not getting anywhere closer with that line of effort so you start copying text from the banking site and pasting into Google's online translation utility to figure out where you are in the logic of internet banking but when some of the important decision making Korean text sit inside an image and you can't be bothered to type out the Korean characters in order to translate them you decide to go back to the clicking around solution because, hey, any monkey should be able to figure this out and you know you're pretty wise when it comes to 33 year old monkeys so you think you've found it, the drop down list of bank cards you own with this bank and BIG POT (ah ha!) in the list. You click it. You click the button you think says, "give me what I what" FINALLY and then it asks you to confirm with your electronic security certificate that is required for all online banking sites so you dutifully do so without thinking anything weird about it, feeling that you're only moments away from being as smart as a monkey and getting what you want. And then … something you don't expect; some Korean message that seems unusual and slightly negative in nature. You note that the message is highlight-able so you highlight it and copy it and paste it into Google's Translate utility and you find out …
you've just reported your credit card as lost or stolen
and you almost scream silently at the helplessness that is at the very core of functioning in a country that is not your own where the language is and always will be so very foreign. and you actually think for just a moment that going downstairs to the bank branch that you have frequented with all your in-branch banking needs since you started working for this company (which, by the way, will only send your paycheck to that banking institution), and demanding that the sweet smiling non-Egnlish speaking bank tellers give you an explanation as to why they moved your cheese and demand to know whom of them is going to be the one to hold your hand back to health and walk you through the new online banking layout but then the second passes and you realize, no you don't want to make an ass of yourself AGAIN, but think it would be a much more productive use of your time to sit there in your own funky anger and justify your state of crazy to yourself, and your blog, and your 3.3repeating fans in hopes that someone out there totally gets this disease that you have and then you won't feel so alone.
Why on earth would the Lost/Stolen option be at the #2 spot on the 2nd tier hierarchy level of the decision making flow on an online banking website? There is no intuitive reason for that. Tier 2, spot 2 should be reserved for more commonly needed services, like "show me my transactions dammit". Lost/Stolen should be demoted to last position … or right before "sign me up for a flight to outer space".
--- click with caution
lesson #4563580, learnt.
2 comments:
oh my gosh sue! that is fantastic! what a wonderful new adventure to fill your time with! It as if life just said, "Dear Sue, I have been thinking that you have not had near ENOUGH to deal with lately and that your stress level might actually be at ground zero SOOOO I decided to add just a tad more to your plate. ENJOY!"
good grief .. was that all ONE sentence?! most people would slam down a phone or punch a pillow - but you write out your anger using a rare and thrilling combination of logic and passion. is your hair all standing straight up on end? are your eyes popped out? are you drooling? why do you do this? why don't you come home?
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