Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Friday, 5 September 2003

# 7:30 PM

several different rants at once, or, technology bites

My bank has recently upgraded all its ATMs. The only difference, as far as I care, is that they display blipverts at you while you're waiting for them to give you your money. To date, it's always the same blipvert, plugging their online banking service.

This change adds absolutely no value for me, the user. Instead, it annoys me on three grounds: first, that I resent the appearance of advertising in yet another context, second, that I've seen the same ad about three hundred times now and I'm sick of it, and third, that I already use their online banking service, so why must they plug it at me?

There's a way around the ads: tell the ATM to display its menus in Spanish. The bank has not yet bothered to do Spanish ads, so none appear. One wonders what this says about the bank's advertising department's prediction of the demographics of their Anglophone and Hispanophone customers.

BART has recently upgraded all its ticket-selling machines. This upgrade does add utility for the user. All the machines can now give change, and you can buy tickets with credit or ATM cards. However, they seem to break down a lot more. Once recently I was waiting in line at the only functional machine; all the others were displaying a NOT IN SERVICE screen except for the one being actively taken apart by the station agent and the one that was showing a Windows NT boot splash screen (which never did go away, the whole time I was there). I am not sure the tradeoff is worth it.

The new machines are not as nice as they could have been, either. The biggest missing features is the ability to eat several old tickets and spit out a new ticket with their combined value; I'm constantly finding myself with several five-cent tickets and no easy way to get rid of them. Also, they don't understand dollar coins, and they don't give optimal change. I have $4.45 of change from them in my pocket right now, half of which is dimes.

And, this isn't a technology grouse so much as an entrenched bureaucracy grouse. I want virtual postal addresses. I should be able to receive all my mail, including packages, at an address which never changes, but is automatically routed to wherever I happen to be living. Obviously the agency providing the address has to know where that is. In lieu of this, I want the USPS to understand that permanent forwarding orders are supposed to be permanent, not expire in three months.