ianandoana.com

It seems like I’ve been using the internet forever but a lot of businesses are still holding on to their brick and mortor ties and not doing things in very efficient manners. Case in point, I bought a trip down to California using airmiles. I was up late and I booked the flight at 2am. After booking the flight there was a 1-888 number that I had to call to confirm the flight, what’s up with that? Since it was booked using airmiles I did have to give them my ccard details in order to pay the taxes but still why only automate half of the process and make you complete the details over the phone? Not only did I have to call to confirm but I also had to call during certain hours which the website didn’t mention, I procrastinated a little and called at 10:30pm the next night. The website said I had 24 hours until 9:02EST the morning after to call or my reservation would be cancelled. When I did call it said the office was closed and that they opened at 7am EST so I ended up setting my alarm and getting up at 5am to confirm. I think I am just too spoiled with all the services that are starting to be offered online and how convient they are that I forget how most of the world operates.

Another gripe I have is with ccard fraud services. They are terrible. I have a ccard and I wanted to fill up my car with gas – I love pay at the pump – but I tried and it didn’t go through – I hate that!. The fraud service thought this was an unusual transation as they claimed that I had never used it to buy gas. I ended up using a different card and didn’t figure out what happend until a couple days later when they contacted me. Just the other week I used my main ccard for a couple of purchases over $1000 and the next day some woman from the fraud department called me and told me that I had been double billed. After talking to her – I think she must have been on something – she said that the amounts were different and that they were in fact billed from two different companies. The only commonality was that they were both over $1000 and they occured on the same night, what a moron. After wasting a bunch of my time talking to her she ended the call with “Is there anything else I can do for you tonight”, yes you could stop talking before I lose so many iq points I have to get a job and work for a company that employs the likes of you. Rather than harass me about nothing can’t you take the two minutes it takes to look at what you are calling me about and get your story straight? Ah the things I wish I was mean enough to say aloud, I am probably part of the problem by not saying that aloud and shaming her into being smarter or getting off the drugs.

Despite all the griping there are some great things that I have learned to love recently.

GMAIL – It is a little different and at first I think the only reason I signed up for an account was to grab my firstname-lastname address before someone else did, I managed to do that for all the other email provides except yahoo which I choose a stupid address on way back when it first came out and didn’t thinkto grab my full name at the time. Anyway gmail is great, I love that my contacts and email are stored somewhere other than my computer. When my harddrive died recently it was a lot less painful than it would have been had my contacts and emails been only stored on it. The only thing better than it keeping all my data hopefully in a harddrive fail proof manner is that it is free. I was paying for forwarding from another company canada.com – they are terrible but I’ll leave that for a different time – and now it is better and free.

SKYPE – I am really into free things. Telus landline non-plan rates to the UK are 74 cents from 10am to 6pm and 55 cents from 6pm to 10am. I’ve been using skype to call, computer to telephone and I’ve been paying .017 euro = 2.5 cents a minute. Not too shabby. I also have to admit that I love just finding the person’s name and double clicking it to call. The headphones and mic are much more comfortable than the telephone headset and I can use my computer and do other things while talking. I suppose with the handsets for cordless phones you can be doing other things like laundry or watching tv but they don’t really leave your hands free and I don’t typically do that while talking. After all the years telcos have been screwing people it is about time they die the horrible and painful death they deserve.

Google Calendar, Google Picasa, Google Desktop – Love em. Flickr, I am starting to like it…. not quite loving it yet.

INGDIRECT EFT – electronic fund transfers. Presidents Choice Banking. Paypal. Love em.

What drives you mad, what can’t you say enough good things about? Let me know.