Not software exactly...

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From: Darrell Fuhriman
Subject: Not software exactly...
Date: 16:48 on 31 Dec 2003
... but I really need to rant about this, and figure someone,
somewhere wrote the idiotic software that generates this stuff.

So, back in October I switched my cell service from ATT TDMA
service to the GSM/GPRS service.  At the same time, I added a
second phone with shared minutes which my GF uses.

Now, I don't know if it was caused by the transition or if it
would have happened anyway, but my new monthly bill was in a new
format, which I might add is totally unreadable.

First off, there's no statement anywhere, like on my old bill,
which said, "Here's how many minutes you have in each of the
various categories and here's how many you've used."

Instead it says things like:

Description            Qnty Used        Charge
INCLUDED MINUTES       68 MIN           0.00

Well, that's nice, but how many did I have to begin with?  And
not only that, it says it in two different places, one for each
phone, and THE DESCRIPTIONS ARE DIFFERENT so I have no idea how
to sync up the two phones to get the total used in the shared plan.

Not only that, some of the charges often don't even make any
sense.

For example:

TEXT MESSAGES SENT     108 MIN          10.80
INCLUDED IN PLAN MB     60 MIN          0.00

For god's sake, Megabytes are not minutes, and text messages are
not minutes, either.  Plus, I have no idea what 60 MIN means in
the context of data transfer.  I can only *assume* that it's
talking about KB of data, but who the fuck knows?

I also have every month a $10 Credit, for reasons which are not
given.  Now, I'm assuming this is to offset the cost of my
outgoing text messages, of which the first 100 are theoretically
free.  But I don't know for sure because it doesn't tell me.  My
previous bill just didn't charge me for messages included in
plan.

Bah.  This thing is such a pile of crap it's clear that the
software that created it is meant for a vertical market -- where
bad ideas never die, they just make more money as they become
more and more unmaintainable.

Darrell



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