Tuesday, July 25, 2006

It's all a big hoax

The hole intarweb thing is a complete hoax. It just does not work, but you won't notice, because we have flashy animations and it's THE INTARWEB and it's hip.

I tried to book a plane ticket via one of the big portals. Searching for flights I found a nice connection, it said e-ticket available, mark it and proceed. Enter a lot of info, click around a lot, sorry, your flight is not available anymore, try a new search. Did that. Repeat ad infinitum. After trying four times I just gave up...

So I went to a travel agency, had a nice chat with the guy there and 15 minutes later I got a ticket for exactly the same flight, but this time 50 Euros cheaper than if I would have bought it via intarweb.

Unrelated I got a mail, saying basically, payment details enclosed (subject line: "VB: Attached Image"). It had a PDF attached with an account number and all the international bank crap you need to send money around in europe (a scanned letter (of course printed out by computer first), so it's a big huge image (340kB!!!!!). Normally I would have thought, well, spam, delete it. The PDF made me worried. So I answered the mail, and, yes, it was payment details for a parking ticket I got nearly half a year back in sweden, where I send a complaint letter, that even if I would like to pay, I just can't, because there is nothing on the ticket stating how. (The story: I parked on something I thought being the vistors parking lot of a students residence. It actually was, but you needed a small paper sticking in your car, which you could get somewhere. The people I vistited in the residence did not know that, nobody told them and the sign was written in swedish, which I don't speak and which was also not understood by the people I vistited, although they speak sewdish quite well... So I got a ticket for 40 Euros, without any information how to pay it if you don't live in sweden.)

So, this mail had two dumbnesses canceling each other out: first make a huge attachment for a line of text, which you could have just put into the mail body and second write a mail which looks 120% like spam.

Maybe I just get disconnected and rely on usable technology like pen and paper, talking to people in person or maybe postal service. All the intarweb just does not work and only frustrates me...

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