Don't Take Me Seriously - Book - Page 160
Breaking the code for ‘dumb’
L
et’s face it, websites
are dumb.
Oh, sure, they can
be all artsy and full-featured
and their servers as beefy as
Popeye’s biceps after spinach. But when it comes right
down to it, their “intelligence” is totally dependent
on their coding. And who
creates the website codes?
Why people do, of course.
And that means there will
always be oversights, dumb
errors and shortcomings resulting from budget limitations — which often result
in total embarrassment for
the poor silicon chips storing the zeros and ones.
This was brought to my
attention recently by a colleague who was searching
online for ATMs. She selected one bank that looked
promising and clicked for its
location — and the website
mapping program promptly gave her the directions to
the location, starting out on
Avenue Hall and heading toward Avenue Crocker, in Valencia. This would have all
been so very helpful — except that the directions ended
in Dunkirk, N.Y., with a plotted journey of 2,501 miles,
lasting (nonstop driving one
would assume) one full day,
plus 16 hours.
And while the server’s
computer chips and the
website codes were offering each other high fives
for another successful mapping, no one bothered to tell
them that this cross-country trip would hardly make
a financially sound visit to
an ATM.
With this as our base level
of expectation, let’s look at a
couple other dumb things
websites can do.
Give you a heart attack:
Temporary glitches in financial websites have been
known to show significant
DON’T TAKE ME SERIOUSLY
drops in your funds. These are
caused by gremlins, of course.
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But if you can survive the
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heart attack and resist jumping
