Chewing The Cud

I don’t know why, but Cingular apparently does not want me paying my bill. When I log into my account to pay online, I was taken to an intermediate page where I was asked, in a mandatory fashion, for my email address. I’m not a big fan of giving that sucker out for no reason, so I simply clicked the ‘Continue’ button. Unfortunately, the button was a link whose href was the lovely octothorpe.

This of course meant I was going nowhere by means of that button. I was quite peeved at this point because, not only did I not get an explanation from the page telling my why my email was required, but I also had no explanation for why the continue button failed to do so. The age-old adage, “Fail to communicate with me properly once, you suck; fail twice, now I’m pissed” came to mind.

So what’s a web geek to do? Obviously search the page’s javascript for the form submission line and execute it directly through Firebug commandline! Should any Cingular users get frustrated as well, get Firebug (and Firefox, which I have to mention since Google Analytics tells me the internets are alive with IE users still – shame on you all), and execute this line of code:

document.updateRequiredRegisteredInfoActionForm.submit();

Not only did this forward me on to my account page, but it also bypassed the need to fill in my email for no good reason. I get enough spam as it is. So there it is my friends; simple, one-liner to defeat Cingular’s attempts to be poor communicators. A silver lining here, besides getting in, is the lesson learned from Cingular’s mistake: Don’t suck at communicating with your users!

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

In the quest to continually update our language and give it new forms of expression, and because I === geek, I am going to help promote an alternative to the geeky “you got owned” and its various l33t spellings, one that should hopefully appeal to a broader audience.

Now, instead of getting “owned”, its “you just got Mario-ed!”. This is short hand notation for saying “You got one-upped”, and as we all remember, 1-ups were fairly elusive in the original Mario Bros. So there you go, inspired by xkcd, I challenge you to let people know when you’ve Mario-ed them.