How about “nothing” ?

While reading this interesting post about the history of the Internet, I realized that Napster was hot more than 10 years ago. It started in 1998 actually. Now we all know what happened with Napster and we also know what the music industry did to steer people away from Napster: they sued.

During that time, Apple came and started its own store. Taking people by surprise I guess as I suppose no one thought selling songs for 99 cents would ever be a successful idea. Oh boy… Who’s laughing now?

The music industry had over 10 years to come up with a solution to online music sharing and NOTHING is here now. 10 years is long in “Internet years”. Too long…! When people get fed up, they take matters into their own hands. Technology wise, we went from CRT TV’s to plasma to LCD to LED LCD’s that can show Youtube content. We went from tape to DVD to HD-DVD to Blue Ray. What the heck have they done..!?

They sacrificed long term profitability by using short term scare tactics. And where’s THEIR solution now?

I guess we can say they get what they deserve… Should we feel bad about them? I think we all know the answer.

At least they’re smart enough to pick the error.

While I don’t recall everything, one thing struck me: the price (it was printed in very large size too..!) To call back home on that exceptionally low roaming fee, you’ll have to spit out 2 dollars per minute.

Yes, 2 bucks!

I immediately told myself that if I were the marketing VP, I’d be scared to lose my job. This is not advertizing, it’s corporate suicide.

In this rough economy, don’t go out and tell people that they have to pay a stupidly high fee (2$ per minute is nuts) to use YOUR product. Find a free or very cheap alternative or promote something else like how outdated your phones are…! Why couldn’t they promote Skype or something else like that?

Even if the regular roaming fees are crazy (up to 7$ per minute depending of where you are), don’t advertise a fee that rivals erotic chat fees!

This ad was obviously targeted at companies and we must remember that companies want to save money, not spend more! By seing that ad, it left me with a very bad feeling on how expensive cell phones can be and if I were a company president, I’d be looking at downsizing our cellular contract instead of looking at 2$ per minute roaming…

What a waste of advertising money from Rogers…

I go the Aeroplan site and apply for a card. So far so good. Next page is where problems really start kicking in. First of all, I don’t get a Captcha image!

Weird I tell myself so I hit the “get another image” button without any luck. Being a geek, I look at the source code and try to generate an image manually – no luck. Oh well, I guess the server must be down or something..?

However, since I don’t use Internet Explorer, I decided to give it another try with the devil’s browser. And guess what? The image appears! Nice usability work guys…

Now look at this. This is the crappiest Captcha I’ve seen in a long time. It’s not a Captcha, it’s almost brain washing. Trust me, when you click “Try another image”, you get all kinds of funny messages like “2000 PaRTnerS wHo LoVe YoU Wo0t!!!11!!” and so on. And as you can guess, it’s pretty hard to type as you need to constantly switch between lowercase and uppercase.

BTW, is there really so much frequent flyer card fraud that you need to put captchas to prevent this? I’d like to know.

Oh well, let’s continue shall we? After all the work spent, let’s not stop here. Not that I really need the card but I might as well finish what I was doing…

Here comes the submit button – all looks good! Oh wait… another error? This time it says that my “street number” is out of range?

What kind of error is that? I live where I live, and my address is a 4 digit number. My address is not THAT big, how can it be out of range? So just for fun, I removed some digits until I eventually tried a one digit address – still no luck.

WTF?

Well at this point, I’m pretty upset but I still want my damn card. I have no idea what else to try… I guess that 99% of people would’ve quit at this point BUT NOT ME! :)

So I tried a few things, you know, basic try and error process… I finally changed the street name and added “rue” in front of it and guess what? It freaking worked! 

So you tell me: how could a normal person (i.e. someone like my dad who is not computer savvy) could EVER figure out that error message? How can a normal person know that “street NUMBER out of range” really means “we couldn’t lookup your street NAME in our cheezy database”…?!?

What kind of shitty programming is that? What if you live in a new development where your street name might not be in their database yet? You are SO screwed!

I finally got my card and I hope I’ll never have to go back on that site. Anyone got any scary stories like that?