Chris Meistre

On Sunday, 4 October 2009, I tried to log into my FNB online account to transfer money into my account before debit orders go off.  Instead I was greeted with a message to say that they’re offline.  I didn’t worry too much, because this was just one of the many times I couldn’t log in on a Sunday.

Monday morning came and I still couldn’t log on.  It’s now 19:30, 32.5 hours later, and I still cannot log into FNB.  Instead they are advising me “We apologise for Online Banking not being available to use currently. Our support team is attending to the problem. As an alternative you can use Cellphone Banking.”

I’ve never registered for cellphone banking and was told that I need to phone them to activate it.  After phoning the number 3 times and getting cut off after holding for about 20 minutes each time I gave up.  What has gone so terribly wrong that they have to be down for so long?

Not only could I not do inter account transfers to make sure my personal accounts have enough money for debit orders, but I’ve had to delay sending stock to clients because I couldn’t confirm proof of payments.  This resulted in at least 2 orders being canceled today.

Surely if it’s an upgrade that went wrong they can restore from a backup or at least have a roll back feature?  And I’m sure it doesn’t take 32.5 hours to find out what the problem is, especially if it’s in house software.

And up to now, no one is able to give any indication of when it will be fixed.

I’m not the only that is pissed off by this.  It only takes a Google search of FNB for updates in the last 24 hours or a search on Twitter to see people are not happy.  I am sure though that all this anger just falls on deaf ears, because the banks have us by the balls.

We had time to kill while waiting for my bakkie to get washed, so we walked around the Moffet on Main Shopping centre on Friday.  As we had about 2-3 hours to kill we literally had to go into each shop because the centre is actually so small and there are very few shops.

One of the shops we went into is House & Home.  While browsing around I went to have a look at all the TV sets they’ve got on display.  The first ones we saw are the Samsung LCD and Plasma ranges.  They were playing some sort of Samsung promotional DVD on them and the quality on the sets looked amazing.  Just down the aisle they had the LG series of TV sets.  Same types, LCD and Plasma.

I noticed that the quality of the LG TV sets were quite bad compared to the Samsung TVs.  There were way more LG TVs there, and after having had a look at all of them I just couldn’t understand why the quality of the video playing on them is so bad.  Then I clicked.  They were busy playing what looked like a home made video, probably off a VHS cassette.  It was a House & Home promotional video they were playing.  The quality of the video was extremely bad though and didn’t do the LG TV sets justice at all.  While on the Samsung TVs, the quality looked awesome because of the better quality movie playing on there.

So, on first glance it looked like the Samsung TVs were way better than the LG TVs, but it ended up being some idiot that decided to put a crappy looking promotional video on the LG TVs.  How stupid is that?  You’d think they would play the best quality video they can on all of them so that you can judge which TV is really suited for your needs.

If I were the LG rep that went into House & Home and saw this, I’d be very upset.

I wonder if Coega has qualified people working on their computers in the offices.  And by qualified people I mean a secretary or assistant that at least knows how to use an email program.  I received a puzzling email from Nelitha Tayi (Nelitha.Tayi@coega.co.za) asking me to provide a quotation on their ICT needs.  The puzzling part was the attachment.

Once opened I had a list of 41 IT companies in Port Elizabeth, obviously from the Coega database.  This contained information like the normal contact information.  The worst part is 2 very confidential information parts they give out.  The Average Turnover of each company as well as the Biggest Contracts awarded to those companies.

I replied to the email asking to speak to a supervisor about the incident because they need to make sure this doesn’t happen again.  What would happen if they “by mistake” forwarded other confidential information to your competitors?

I received a call back from Nelitha, and this is what pissed me off this most.  It wasn’t that she didn’t want me to speak to a supervisor, it was that she said, “No one else received the document because she had Recalled the email.”  For those that don’t know, check out http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA010917601033.aspx.  It just means you can try and get your email back before it reaches the recipient, but mostly it only works for the internal office email.

Explaining to her that if I received the document, what makes her so sure the other 40 recipients didn’t receive it, she carried on to explain that it must definitely be so because she hit the recall button and out of the 41 people I am “definitely” the only person to have received it.

Let this be a lesson for those that trust their secretaries with confidential information.  Who knows, the next time she can send out employee salary slips to the wrong people.  Everyone can make mistakes, I can understand, but some mistakes can be avoided.

Sometimes I wonder what goes on in their minds when Telkom spend millions implementing something that doesn’t get used.

2 examples that I’ve experienced again today just baffles my mind.

Entering your phone number on the keypad and then being asked for it again
Part of the long process of actually getting through to a human being to talk about a problem you are experiencing with your telephone line is entering your ten digit phone number. Then it is read back to you and you need to confirm that it is indeed correct. After that 5-10 minute process you are put on hold for another 30-90 minutes (depending if they’re on lunch or not) only to get through to a human that asks you, “Please, what is your number?”. What did I waste my time for entering it in the first place?

Referring me to their competitor’s site to do a line speed test
They wanted me to test the line speed, and instead of directing me to a telkom.co.za address, they send me to http://speedtest.neotel.co.za/, which is the website of their competitor, Neotel. Huh?

Vodacom has launched Vodacom Fame (http://www.vodacomfame.co.za/).  It’s all a promotion combined with a competition to get people and celebrities to make a video resembling the Single Ladies spoof that is airing at the moment.  It’s a ripoff of the Beyonce Knowles music video.  I like the video, and the promotion is a good idea.

The problem is that the website is broken.  Going to http://www.vodacomfame.co.za/zoopy or any derivative thereof brings up:

A timeout occured while waiting for the script output (in: /usr/www/users/vodacoa/index.php).

Why the fail?  My money is on the fact that the website interfaces with Zoopy which is an only video sharing services, and the interfacing is either broken or cannot handle the traffic that the website is generating.  User registration, login, etc. doesn’t work currently.

So if you’re like me and would really like to see these videos, give http://vodacomfame.co.za/ a skip and go direct to http://www.zoopy.com/ and search for “single ladies”.

Next time you want a run a good marketing campaign (and I do believe this is a brilliant one) consider that it will actually work and you’ll need stable software.