I'm on the phone with a bank. I have two credit card accounts with them. I've got one of them registered for on line banking and bill paying. The other one needs to be paid. Today.

There's no way that I can see on the web site to register the other one, at least with the same user name.

I call the help number. I have to call three times, each time repeating my sixteen digit credit card number, each time having them verify all of my vital information, each time telling me that they can't help but that they'll transfer me to someone who can. The first two times, this results in a long hold period, and then a dial tone as the line is dropped.

The third time is the charm.

I talk to the young woman on the other end, and explain that I'd like to pay both of my cards on line. She says she'll have to go talk to someone else.

She comes back in a few minutes, and informs me that we can register my other card, but first we have to cancel the first one.

???

"I don't want to cancel the one that I've already successfully registered. I want to have them both registered."

She says, "That's the only way to do it." She says this as though it's perfectly reasonable. As though no one in their right mind would want to be able to make an on-line payment of their bills on more than one card, or would mind continually cancelling and reregistering the credit cards twice a month in order to do so.

I finally persuade her that this is not exactly a customer-friendly policy, and she goes off to talk to them again.

This is yet to be resolved, but I'm simply amazed at how stultifyingly dumb the designers of some on-line commerce sites can be.

Shhhhhh! Try not to disturb the site designers. They're working on a new Flash intro with a black background.

It's difficult to draw conclusions from your experience. Maybe the main problem is that you're dealing with a bank?

You should just be glad you've never had to deal with qwest. They have about half a dozen different databases that simply do not interract with each other. If something is screwed up badly it takes forever to get them to sort it out.

I'm sure that the fact that it's a bank is a large part of the problem, but that's who I'm considering the site designer (i.e., someone who puts together the specifications for it).

I don't mean literally the coders (at least in this case, though they can do dumb things, too).

In recent weeks, I've come to the conclusion that all people in American commerce who know even the rudiments of good customer service, have been canned and are now holding cardboard signs on street corners.

Don't feel too bad, Rand. I'm sitting in a credit card customer service center right now, and our website doesn't even OFFER online payments. And we don't take checks by phone either, so it could be worse.

Don't feel too bad, Rand. I'm sitting in a credit card customer service center right now, and our website doesn't even OFFER online payments. And we don't take checks by phone either, so it could be worse.

It's even worse than you know at Qwest...at US West, BEFORE the Qwest merger, a business sales-person there had login's to over 90 differnet systems....I'm sure that number hasn't DECREASED since the merger!!

But I"m fortunately not a customer of theirs anymore (cell phone and a cable modem :-)

-Dave in AZ

i want the credit card today