Ramblings of Narc

Right, so I’ve been churning a rant around in my head for the past several days, it’s time to put it to writing. This rant is about Vodafone Romania‘s customer care web application, the most disgusting pile of c… code that ever saw the light of the Internets.

Let me begin with a bit of background. I was a Connex customer before it was bought (or whatever) by Vodafone and rebranded. I’ve been a customer for at least five years, but more likely closer to 7 or 8 (neither me nor my mum remember). I was underage at the time of creating the contract, so it was made in my mother’s name, where it still is for now, so anything that requires the actual contract holder present is relatively difficult for me.

This all sets up the background for this story. A few months ago, I found myself in need of a backup Internet connection, as my primary one (which is a source of hate all on its own, but that’s another blog post) was getting flaky.

So I went to the Vodafone site, and after several attempts, managed to register to use the old customer care system, and with it, was able to disable the unused MMS support and enable a reasonably cheap Mobile Internet solution, which served me well as a backup.

However, in recent days, I’ve found this particular payment plan to be insufficient to my needs. Now, Vodafone offers a so-called “unlimited” Mobile Internet plan, but that requires the contract holder’s presence. It’s next to impossible to synchronize my schedule with my mother’s for anything like that on short notice, so I went for the next best thing — an upgrade from 25 MB included (at 4 EUR/mo) to more megabytes included — I don’t use _that_ much, on average, anyway.

And there, the troubles started.

First of all, I went to the Vodafone site to find the old customer care application was disabled, and instead there was a new one, aptly called “MyVodafone v. 2.0.1″. It’s shiny. It’s flashy (not in an Adobe way). And, best of all, it’s v. 2.0! That’s got to be better, right?

Yeah, I got fooled by that, too.

To begin with, the old interface was slow at times. It was slightly confusing (took me four or five tries to register in the first place), and the help links (linking back to the main site) were broken because of a recent site redesign. None of that, however, prevented it from doing its job correctly, as evidenced by the fact that I was able to get mobile internet to begin with.

The new interface is not so confusing. I had to re-register, presumably because the old interface used your cellphone number as a login, whereas this one calls for a login name. The registering part went great. As I said, not so confusing. That was good.

What wasn’t so good: the new application seems to be written in some bastard child of Java and Javascript, using Javascript for the internal hyperlinks instead of linking to the pages like every other normal person on the Internet. Oh, well, I think, I don’t normally disable Javascript anyway, so it doesn’t affect me.

Well, it wouldn’t affect me, if it weren’t for the small problem that the Vodafone pages tend to time out, or error out. And when that happens, you’re left at the old page, on which the link is now disabled because, hey, you already clicked it, right? Thus requiring a refresh of the page, and a lot of waiting.

Oh, yes, the waiting. Considering the fact that the front-end pages work like a fucking dream, you’d expect the customer care app to run at least decently, even though it has to keep track of logins and cookies and all that junk, right? Well, if you were expecting that (I was), be prepared to be severely disappointed.

Because of the reliance of Javascript junk and probably some configuration mismanagement, it can take up to several minutes for a page to load. And you have to wait for the whole page to load, otherwise the Javascript links aren’t going to work, or they’ll error out, or whatever other weird broken shit you could imagine can happen, will happen.

But wait, it gets better. Half of the time, the pages won’t load at all, and you’re left staring at a blank page and wondering what to do next. Go back to the previous page and try clicking the link again? Or try to click “Go” in the address bar and hope it loads this time? Good luck to you, whatever you do, ’cause whatever you do, the same thing is going to happen on the next page you load. And then the next one after that. And so on, in an infinite loop, for as long as you try to make use of this application.

This is an internal application link: “javascript:doEcareLinkSubmit(‘navigateMenu.do’,'_navigation_primaryMenu=myServices’);”. Note how it’s Javascript. Note how it calls on some stupid function that sets up (what else) a POST request to a URL, because it has to post a whole lot of data the server can’t keep track of using the normal method of having a simple cookie with a session ID, and a file or database entry on the server side which associates the required data with the ID in question. The important bit, however, is that I can’t use it without Javascript.

But that’s okay, because I can’t really use it with Javascript, either. You see, after you brave the Javascriptiness, and the immensely slow page loads, and the complete and utter junk that is the User Interface itself (undoubtedly designed by a programmer… no, wait, I mean a coder. I’m a programmer and I don’t do this shit), and finally end up at the right page to change the payment plan, and go through the four step change and “confirmation” pages, each of which needs a complete new page from the server (they couldn’t even use a bit of Ajax to speed things along), and assuming you don’t have to deal with the popup from Firefox saying “Could not establish an encrypted connection because [sic] certificate presented by www.vodafone.ro has an invalid signature” (as I said, misconfiguration)…

…even if you get through all that, the end result is being told “The changes could not be applied”, with no idea what to do next to fix it, however with a nice additional text inviting you to call customer support on the hotline, and waste some poor joe’s time with something the Web interface could’ve handled easily, but it doesn’t because it’s a huge pile of shit.

Let me repeat: the Web interface is such a completely dysfunctional pile of shit that it’s actually better to call the customer support hotline, wait on hold for however long, talk to someone for however long, than to try to use this thing.

My time costs money. The CS representative’s time also costs money. If the Web interface were done right, it would cost a lot less to do this change through it than any other way. But the Web interface isn’t done right. It’s shit. It’s a Java/Javascript nightmare with HTML that probably crawled out of a sewage tank one night and decided to sit on the Web server. It’s a slow, bug-ridden horror story where, at each click, you wonder if you’re going to get a page load (in a few minutes) or if you’re going to get an error, or a blank page, and have to figure out what to do next.

In short, this is customer scare. In the long run, I’m tempted to just abandon the phone number and change providers, because this shit just isn’t worth it. In the short run, I’m going to call customer support, and I’m not going to be bitchy, because it’s not the CS person’s fault, and I’m probably going to get what I want, after another (long or short, who knows) run-around.

This is what not to do, people. Don’t alienate your customers. This isn’t a 2.0 version, this is an 0.2. The application should never have been deployed to customers. It’s not even worthy of being called a Beta. Or an Alpha. It’s just junk, something somebody puked up one day (or multiple days, who knows?). It’s not something usable. It’s not functional. It doesn’t work. It raises my blood pressure and pisses me off, because as a Web programmer, I could write this fucking application in two days, completely alone, and it would be just as flashy and shiny, and — more importantly — it would work!

And if I, a one-man show, could do it right in a week or less, what excuse does Vodafone — a company that surely dedicates a lot of resources to their Web presence, a company that tries to pride itself on customer support — what excuse do they have in feeding their customers this shit? And why should I continue doing business with them, in these circumstances?