the customer is dead and technology killed them

 The customer is dead. Long live the supplier!

We returned from a trip “out west”. In the mail was a bill from a State through which we drove. Apparently we drove on a road that was a toll road. As you may know they don’t collect tolls anymore at toll booths because that would mean someone would need to be paid a salary, and benefits, and vacation… we can’t have that! So instead they have computers and cameras and interconnected data bases and they take a picture of your vehicle and then charge you for driving on their roads.

Some of the road on toll roads are not so great! For example there is a gigantic bump that only the dentist would like... the one who will fix teeth after people go over it and their lowers meet their uppers abruptly.  This obstacle is growing right after you go through the toll booth on I80 coming into Indiana. It will rattle your brain. Rearrange your innards. Put your head on the roof. 

And you pay to drive on that road. You pay twice. You pay about 50 cents in tax when you fill up your car with gas (or diesel) and then again in toll. It’s an awful bump.

Other roads that are tolls aren’t great either. The best were in Oklahoma. Congratulations Okies. You have a nice toll road.

… but I digress…

We got home and there was a bill. You could pay “on line” so I signed up for an account. They want to know everything there is to know about you. They want to know things about you that you already have forgotten and you are yourself. What is your mother’s maiden name? What is your blood type? Please send us some so we will know for sure? 

…maybe I’m exaggerating…

Okay I got all signed up. And then, like so many other websites, they boot you off and then you have to sign in again after your account is established. After they have your credit card and know the color of your eyes. The name of your first pet. 

I could not get back onto the website. I tried many times. It was not happening.

I tried again the next day. Ditto results.

So I sent them a check. In the good old US Mail. Old School. Snail mail.

Then, as you may have read, we had to do an obituary for Pam’s sister Linda. They needed a picture and someone sent Pam a nice picture of Linda. It appeared to be a cell phone picture. I'm pretty good with pictures if I don't say so myself so I worked on the picture.

The picture was on a black background and Linda had this white fringe all around her. The photo needed to be cropped so I worked on those things and substituted the black background for something a little more pleasant. 

The newspaper that Pam wanted the obituary to appear in was using what appeared to be a third-party piece of software that was plugged into their systems. The newspaper's software would not accept the picture. I tried again and again, and it just would not accept the picture that I had processed. 

Two hours later I finally figured out how to strip all the metadata off the file and upload it so that the newspaper's software would accept the picture. 

That wasn't the end of the story because there was a field in the software that we could not fill out. The field was the funeral home. Linda was not going to a funeral home. She had decided to give her body to science so it was going to the university and not to a nursing home. We couldn't complete that required field. 

Pam had to call the newspaper and send everything to them by email. So their software was doing neither them or us any good.

Guess what? The picture that I'd worked so hard on was not acceptable to them even though the software that they were using accepted it. We had to send another, different version of the picture. 

So here's the point. 

All of this software that we deal with, all of these things that we work on and we submit and we struggle with, aren't for our convenience, as we are told. It's for the convenience of the people on the other end, who are trying to do without employees and are trying to make their work more efficient and less costly for themselves. They don't care about the customer.

Linda had two cats that she loved and that her neighbors loved but nobody in her immediate family could take care of them. We called the humane society of the county in which she lived. It took multiple telephone calls to try to get someone who would talk to us about taking these cats. Finally somebody did return our call. By the time they got back to us, we had thankfully gotten the cats a nice home. 

I'm betting you can tell me stories of your own.

My point is the customer is dead. 

PS: The Humane Society would only take the cats if we provided them a death certificate.