diary of an Endorphin Junkie

I've been holding my breath on this one, because I held out some slim hope that it was some silly mistake that would find its way free. Sadly, it's just not going to be.

While working at Laguna Seca for FIM/MotoGP, I met a very nice person. We chatted, it was nice. We took a walk together during one of our breaks, and it turns out that I *really* liked this person. We had a lot in common. A technical worker in biotech, well established and focused on career and enjoying life. Who liked hanging out with men because they were simple, and didn't make up drama. Just a lot in common, and enough differences to be interesting.

( lots of boring details )

So now I'm done with it. I was a bit bitter about it after the event, but now I'm really bitter. Why would someone spend so much time getting to know someone, and then play stupid games like this?

The only thing I know for sure is that if by any chance I run into her again, I have no intention of acknowledging her existence. People who want or need some kind of drama to sustain themselves are just scary. It's really too bad that she wasn't anything she claimed to be.

So I have a hard time writing this, because I really like WAMU as a bank. But I've always had major problems with their web development group, and it's gotten much much worse in the last two weeks. Before today:

1. There's no bug reporting system. They won't accept bugs, because they have no way to report them. (I've been told by an internal manager that this is not true, and that I'm being lied to)

2. Nobody in their call center can pull up the website, so they can't confirm any details.

3. They'll insist that any problem is a cache problem in my browser when I can demonstrate the problem on three different browsers on 4 different operating systems

4. They have major display problems on an ongoing basis that remain unfixed for months. I've helped them identify problems, and sent them the code fixes for the site on numerous occasions. And it will take them 2-3 months to implement.

5. They never test anything before deployment. I mean seriously, the worst possible bugs always appear after every rollout.

Wow, this is bad, right? What could be worse? How about Downloads have been completely broken for 2 weeks? Online banking? Who needs that? Will they put up a page saying "Downloads are broken, please come back later?" Nope. You have to keep typing in all the information and getting no response.

And there's worse.

A. At first, the running balance was zeroed out. You saw zeros in the running balance column of your itemized transactions.

B. Online transfers didn't work for a day.

C. They finally revised (after years and years of customer complaints) the Download transactions page. But they fixed none of the problems. In fact, they added lots of extra whitespace so that you still have to scroll down to the click the download button. Why?

D. The logout link was broken for a week. They were trying to use ActiveScript (which only works in MSIE) but did that wrong, so nobody could log out.

E. Technical support lines are now running 35 minute minimum to talk to someone.

F. They now provide "available balance" and "ledger balance" as separate columns, but both numbers appear in the ledger balance column.

G. After spending an hour making them understand the problem, they'll suddenly come up with "the web developers already know about all the bugs" and refuse to file a bug report.

H. They refuse to get a real manager on the phone, and promise a callback instead. Which never happens.

This is seriously amazing. I mean really, this is one of the largest banks in the US. And their web development team is apparently a single 12-year old kid with a book about ASP programming. No QA team, no testing, no visible experience managing a production website like this. Damn