Today’s SPOTD goes not to a person but to a monkey. You see, it could only have been a monkey that designed the billing system for Telstra. (For those overseas, Telstra is the largest phone company in Australia).

Despite paying all the bills on time regularly for years, I missed paying one and only remembered when the reminder notice came.  Immediately I logged on and paid it - the very same day I received the reminder notice. The problem seems to be though - when you are sent the reminder notice advising you to “pay immediately or face disconnection of services”, what it actually means it “you can pay this but our computer probably won’t pay any attention anyway and you’ll be disconnected”.

Yes, despite paying the bill it seems that the Telstra computers corresponded something along the lines of:

Billing Software (BS): Hey, that guy has not paid his bill. I’ll resend notification. By the way, I’ll tell the Disconnection Software to be on high alert in preparation.

Disconnection Software (DS): Okay, cool. Got the notification to get ready to disconnect. Thanks!

BS: Okay, the guy has paid his bill. Good. There’s no need to disconnect the service.

DS: What?

BS: I said there’s no need to disconnect the service.

DS: Huh?

BS: Leave it connected - he paid the bill.

DS: Whatever dude, I’m disconnecting him.

Great. My first suspicion was that it was related to the bill because I’d made the late payment which had threatened disconnection. However, since they disabled only the outgoing calls and allowed incoming calls to be received, and it turned out that (1) neither of us had need to make an outbound call for a couple of days and (2) the home phone still worked perfectly, it was not immediately apparent to us that despite paying before disconnection might occur, it had already occurred.

Somewhere out there is a monkey with a kazillion bananas as payment for this demented system. Now they have my SPOTD award also.

Categories: SPOTD