I have recently had two very annoying experiences with the online fronts of two different businesses.  First up is Budget truck rentals.  On Tuesday of this week I reserved a moving truck from Budget, using their website.  I picked the closest center to our house as the pickup/dropoff location, and they reserved a truck that I could pick up at 8:30 this morning.

So Stephanie and I headed over there this morning, getting there about 8:00.  We walked up to the office, because we saw a guy getting there and unlocking the gate.  “Are you guys here to pick up a truck?” “Yeah, for Robinson.”  “They were supposed to call you, this location is no longer open.”  “Come again?”  “This location is closed, last Saturday was our last day... what was the name?”  “Robinson.”  He went inside and looked at the four names he had, and said Robinson wasn’t even one of the names he had on his list.  After some discussion, I mention that I made the reservation on Tuesday, after this location had been closed.  He said they were supposed to have blocked that location from the website.  The guy was nice at least, and called around to other Budget locations nearby to see if anyone had a truck that wasn’t reserved, and after about fifteen minutes he found one not too very far away, so we rushed over there to get it.  So it turned out okay, but it was incredibly scary for a minute, because we had to get moved into the house today, and some people from our church were showing up at 9:30 to help with moving and we needed to be there with a truck.  Plus I’m probably going to have to deal with a $50 no-show fee, which will require some kind of hour long phone call to try to explain what happened.

The second situation is with Time Warner.  I called them about two weeks ago to arrange for our cable to be cut off at the apartment and turned on at the house, and they set up an appointment for 1-5 on Friday (yesterday) to turn on the cable at the house (they didn’t have to come out to disconnect at the apartment).  Yesterday morning I wanted to see if the technician could give us a call-ahead before showing up, since 1-5 is a pretty big time window.  I went to the website to find a number, and decided I would go to the “chat with a customer service representative” option.  I wouldn’t have to be on hold forever, and chatting would be easier to do while I was working.  The lady on the chat window told me that a technician didn’t even need to come out, since the last people had never canceled their service, so they would just change the account over to our name.  I was a little miffed at this, because had I not called, someone would have been at the house from 1-5 with no technician showing up.

So this morning, when we were moving into the house, we saw that we had a message.  It was Time Warner, saying that the technician had showed up at 1:50 and no one was home.  When we got a TV unpacked we discovered that the cable had been disconnected and the internet didn’t work.  I called Time Warner and they sent someone out, and when the guy got here and connected everything he said “I’m sorry we have idiots working for us.”

Both of these situations were really annoying, because the people at the website aren’t communicating with the actual people on the ground.  This whole world wide web thing is not new, and its primary purpose is, after all, to be a communication tool.  Both of the situations shouldn’t have happened.