It's incredibly hard to become a customer of @Telstra so you can give them money. They absolutely despise money, and do everything in their power to erect as many obstacles as possible in the way of a normal person establishing a billing relationship with them.

First: "I'd like to buy a 4G WiFi hotspot please."
"Umm, we don't have any. Maybe try K-Mart."

Are you serious? You can't sell me a mobile broadband service, and you'd prefer me to go to a department store. Okay...
So I go to the department store, and they have the same Telstra product $20 cheaper than Telstra does.

Go to activate it. Error message, SIM serial number has already been activated. Well goddamn.
So, back to the @Telstra shop. "Yes, I know I can return the whole thing, but all I want is a $2 SIM to get started. Can you just sell me one of those?"

No. They don't have any. Zero SIMs in the store.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? WHAT OTHER PURPOSE DOES A TELSTRA SHOP HAVE?
Their first suggestion was to buy one from @AusPost, but they take 24 hours to activate their prepaid SIMs. Maybe try Woolies?
So I do that, and get my SIM, and go through trying to activate it. And ... now the identity check fails, so I can't.

Fuck. What?
Get @Telstra online support involved. "We'll send you an update in 30 minutes." 70 minutes later, I ping them for an update.
After much to-and-fro, it turns out that my identity check failed because someone at Telstra 8 years ago entered "Mark Newtown" instead of "Mark Newton" next to my drivers license number, so now I can't prove any ID at all to Telstra for any product.
Online support has fixed that.

So now the SIM ostensibly works.

It has taken 11.5 hours from first visit to the Telstra shop to having a working SIM in a WiFi hotspot.

I could have given up at any time. I don't know why I didn't.
How can they be so fucking bad at this? Every interaction I've ever had with @Telstra has been horrible, and they just don't learn anything, ever. All I wanted was a simple retail service, the thing their network of stores exists to sell, and they can't not screw it up.
Goddamn. So glad that's over.

More from Software

The Great Software Stagnation is real, but we have to understand it to fight it. The CAUSE of the TGSS is not "teh interwebs". The cause is the "direct manipulation" paradigm : the "worst idea in computer science" \1


Progress in CS comes from discovering ever more abstract and expressive languages to tell the computer to do something. But replacing "tell the computer to do something in language" with "do it yourself using these gestures" halts that progress. \2

Stagnation started in the 1970s after the first GUIs were invented. Every genre of software that gives users a "friendly" GUI interface, effectively freezes progress at that level of abstraction / expressivity. Because we can never abandon old direct manipulation metaphors \3

The 1990s were simply the point when most people in the world finally got access to a personal computer with a GUI. So that's where we see most of the ideas frozen. \4

It's no surprise that the improvements @jonathoda cites, that are still taking place are improvements in textual representation : \5

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