Alex Harries's diary

I've written - no, ranted - before about how embarrassingly poor the Alliance and Leicester website is, when their badly-designed personal banking website managed to cost me a lot of money in penalty charges.

Checking my balance tonight (ok, I'm waiting for my student loan to come in so I can pay off some debts and, err, maybe spend some of it on a posh widescreen telly. Maybe...) I noticed an advert-style link at the bottom of the banking website. Apart from anything else, this position is one of the worst places to tuck important information as advert blindness tends to set in for anything placed in this part of a web page.

I'm a cynical git by nature - when I'm not off upsetting people, being embarrasingly drunk, or just being plain embarrassing - and decided to see what wonderous information the A&L were going to provide its customers that one can't already find out by reading any number of existing - and respected - websites (for example here, here, here, here ... etc).

The first thing to annoy me when I clicked the link was that it opened a new window. Not a major issue for most people, maybe, but I consider it bad manners to start popping up new windows on your visitors' computers unless you have a very good reason to do so.

The second annoyance - and this is the point where I decided I had to write a ranty blog entry about this - was the completely gratuitous 2-step entry process - first I was shown a picture of a safe, with some text fading in and finally a "[click here to] enter" link appearing in the middle of the safe's combination dial thingy:

... followed by an equally gratuitous animation of the safe opening:

... and after a few seconds, you're presented with this completely Flash-based website:

Very pretty, lovely... Just one question - why has someone gone to all the trouble to pay - probably a lot of money - to have a Flash website developed to do this, when a plain, boring - but just as pretty - HTML website would have done *exactly* the same job, been a lot cheaper to develop and bug-test, loaded faster, provided a much higher level of accessibility and user friendliness, and would (eventually) have found it's way into the Google indexes??

However, I ought to balance this argument out a little - the information in the site isn't completely crap, although it's extremely basic and does little to help people make use of the myriad free anti-virus and anti-spyware tools available on the net. Oh, and there's also a link to the security centre on the A&L online banking log-in page:

After yesterday's débacle with Alliance & Leicester's website-with-a-mind-of-its-own, I found myself on the phone tonight not once, or twice, but three times speaking to, among others, the very same irritable Leeds woman. My brain's a bit fried, but the conversations went something like...

• (Assistant #1, answering after I had again punched every conceivable combination of numbers into the phone keypad just to find out where I was born, and who Christened me...) "Hello, Alliance & Leicester. Billy-Bob* speaking. How can I help you?"
• (Me) "Hi there, I had a problem with your website a couple of days ago which meant I was given a penalty charge because of a problem with your website. The charge was lifted, but I've now found that you've also put a charge on my other account because the bill payment I was transferring the money for bounced, because the transfer bounced" (at this point my head starts to ache).
• (#1) "Uh huh?" quoth the - probably degree-educated - telephone operator.
  
• (M) "... so I was wondering if you could possibly remove the second charge as it was a result of the first charge, which has been refunded?"
• (#1) "Uhhm..." (I thought this was a stalling tactic on his part. Apparently not...) "I'm afraid our banking system is currently down. You will need to call back later."
• (M) "!!"

... Later. Much later ...

• (Assistant #2, after I had spent yet more of my life pressing numbers into the phone... you get the idea...) "Hello, Alliance & Leicester, Pam speaking. How can I help you?"
• (Me, realising with some suspicion that this was almost certainly Grumpy Woman from yesterday's calls) "Hi there... <explained problem again> ... so could you waive this charge please?"
• (Pam) "Absoluuutely not! We should only have refunded half your first penalty charge, and ... " (basically a "no" thus far, and a very definite indication that I was an idiot for even asking).
• (M) "But as I explained yesterday, ... <I patiently explain how the website was at fault>  ... so if you could please waive this charge I'd be very grateful."
• (P) "But why did you try and transfer money from an account withou sufficient funds in it?"
• (M) "Whuh--?!" - losing a little decorum now - "I tried to transfer money from an account with money in it to another account, which didn't have plenty of money in it, to make sure my bill cleared yesterday." (Thinking: "NGNNNNGNNNNNN...")
  
• ... eventually ...
• (P) "As a gesture of good will, I have refunded the £34 charge into your account --" (It crosses my mind to suggest this is as tacit an admission of guilt as I'll ever hear)
  
• (M) (Thinking) "HOORAYYY!" (... saying:) "Thank y--"
• (P) (Interrupting my thanks) "-- but you will be charged £25 for exceeding your account balance."
• (M) "!!!" (Thinking:) "NGGNNNNNNGGGGNGGG" (Saying:) "Oh..... Uhhm, could I speak to your suprvisor please?"
• (P) (In a tone which conveyed smugness so tangible it stuck my ear to the phone handset) "I'm afraid I am the most senior person here at this time."
• (M) "Guh--!"

Still, at least their computers were working again I guess...

Shortly afterwards, I decided to try and get the third charge removed again...

• (Assistant #3, in a text-book Leeds accent you could demolish t...
  
  About 212 more words in this entry

(Kind-of off-topic in a pixel-orientated way, not to mention long-winded, rambling and - arguably - pointless ;o).

Checking my bank account today to see if a transfer I'd arranged between a couple of my A&L accounts had cleared, I was more than a little confused to spot no sign of the transfer, and a mysteriously overdrawn third account.

Looking further into this, it turned out that my transfer - which should have gone from account A to B, had in fact been set up to go from account C (which didn't have enough money in) to B. Naturally, the transfer failed and account C had a £34 charge applied for a failed payment.

Bugger!

By making another test payment, I figured out what had happened: the A&L "my accounts" homepage has a quick-pay form on the left of the page. By selecting an account to transfer money from, and then moving focus away from the select box, a bit of Ajax pulls in a list of the other accounts you can transfer money to into the select box, below. For some reason though, focus isn't then sent to the second box, so you have to tab about a bit to choose which account you want to send the money to.

Somehow, then, I'd managed to select the right account, move away from the "move money from" box, then instead of tabbing over to the "move money to" box, I'd gone back to the first box and changed the account number, which cocked the transfer up more than a little.

Worse still, when you confirm the amount you want to transfer, you're presented with a screen confirming your choice which displays the account names and numbers on top of each other (thanks to a DIV clearing problem) in Firefox, so it's only possible to work out where your money's going from and to by selecting and copying the text into a text document, for example. So, thanks to this, I didn't spot that I was trying to move money from an account without any in it, which at least explains the penalty charge.

Eventually finding a phone number for the A&L and, having spent ten minutes lost in a seemingly endless array of numerical options, finding out my balance, pin number hint, date of birth, and bra size, and divulging what felt like all of my personal details via. a telephone keypad, I made it through to Sheila*. Sheila was a particularly ratty-sounding Leeds woman who, I can only presume, took an immediate disliking to the way I pronounced my name (maybe it was the Southern accent?) and told me - flatly - that the fault was all my own and that she categorically wouldn't lift the penalty charge.

Uhhm, hang on a minute...

I then manage to get through to Gheeta** in Internet banking and, explaining the problem again, Gheeta told me she would lift the charges "only this once" - hooray! - and would I mind explaining the problem with the website to their technical team - no problem.

So I'm then transferred to the technical support team and spoke to Cletus** who admitted they knew about the problem, but that it had only been found in Firefox 1.5. My new best mate Cletus didn't seem to know if they were going to fix it, and wasn't even aware that it could be fixed ("it's a DIV float clearing problem - honestly, a quick Google will turn up a way of fixing it" quoth I, maybe unintentionally coming across as a bit condescending).

After all that, I'm still waiting (two hours later) for the refund to come back into my account, and Cletus, Gheeta and Sheila are probably off home to drink Ovaltine. I've learnt that I'm no better at remembering names than I ever was, and that there are - it seems - better-paid web designers who don't really seem to know or care about cross-browser continuity.

I think I might stick to high street banking in future... ;o)

* name changed to protect t...