It's that time again at work. My employer rents 4 units in an office block, and so we have four supplies - all dual rate as the building is electric only (night storage heaters - one of the few things to challenge combi boilers in the league table of crappiest ever inventions).
Anyway, my colleague is handed three letters from the supplier (EDF) asking for meter readings (the fourth unit is on a difference billing cycle). Oh what fun, the account numbers on the letters are now different to what is on his spreadsheet - and there isn't enough information on the letters to identify which is for which unit. Cue phone call 1.
So he goes and reads the meters, which have counters labelled "Normal" and "Low". Logs into the website, to be presented with a screen asking for readings labelled "01" and "02". Cue phone call number 2 to find out which value goes into which box - it's been done wrong before and then we get some interesting bills
You'd think is shouldn't be beyond the capabilities of a system to hold a record of what meter type is fitted and present boxes labelled the same as on the meter - wether it's Day/Night or Night/Day, Normal/Low or Low/Normal, or Normal/High or High/Normal, or even just 1 or 2.
Just for good measure, they aren't all the same All the meters are the same, but for some reason the mapping between Normal/Low to 01/02 isn't consistent across the accounts.
2 sets of readings get accepted, the third just results in an error message saying the readings aren't consistent. No clues why or what to do about it !
Cue phone call number 3 to give the readings to someone in a call centre.
This is such a massive user interface fail that words fail me. I really do wonder how on earth they expect non-technical people to read a meter when they seem to have gone out of their way to avoid making it easy.
It should so simple to fix :
1) Include the meter serial number on the letters - that would be enough for us to identify the right meter, though I guess it's not required for domestic customers with only one meter.
2) Present the entry boxes on the website in the same way as they are on the meter. If the meter has Day & Night, label the boxes Day and Night (and the same way round as on the meter). All it needs is a simple lookup table between meter serial number and type, and then pull in a bit of web code appropriate to the meter type. They already appear to deal with multiple registers, so it can't be that hard.
It won't be the programmers fault - they'll just be working to a spec. It's either a systems analyst who just failed to consider the end user of the system, or it's a bean counter somewhere who thought they could save a few quid - even though it must cost them a lot more in handling customer queries.
Oh I feel so much better after a good rant
Anyway, my colleague is handed three letters from the supplier (EDF) asking for meter readings (the fourth unit is on a difference billing cycle). Oh what fun, the account numbers on the letters are now different to what is on his spreadsheet - and there isn't enough information on the letters to identify which is for which unit. Cue phone call 1.
So he goes and reads the meters, which have counters labelled "Normal" and "Low". Logs into the website, to be presented with a screen asking for readings labelled "01" and "02". Cue phone call number 2 to find out which value goes into which box - it's been done wrong before and then we get some interesting bills
You'd think is shouldn't be beyond the capabilities of a system to hold a record of what meter type is fitted and present boxes labelled the same as on the meter - wether it's Day/Night or Night/Day, Normal/Low or Low/Normal, or Normal/High or High/Normal, or even just 1 or 2.
Just for good measure, they aren't all the same
All the meters are the same, but for some reason the mapping between Normal/Low to 01/02 isn't consistent across the accounts.2 sets of readings get accepted, the third just results in an error message saying the readings aren't consistent. No clues why or what to do about it !
Cue phone call number 3 to give the readings to someone in a call centre.
This is such a massive user interface fail that words fail me. I really do wonder how on earth they expect non-technical people to read a meter when they seem to have gone out of their way to avoid making it easy.
It should so simple to fix :
1) Include the meter serial number on the letters - that would be enough for us to identify the right meter, though I guess it's not required for domestic customers with only one meter.
2) Present the entry boxes on the website in the same way as they are on the meter. If the meter has Day & Night, label the boxes Day and Night (and the same way round as on the meter). All it needs is a simple lookup table between meter serial number and type, and then pull in a bit of web code appropriate to the meter type. They already appear to deal with multiple registers, so it can't be that hard.
It won't be the programmers fault - they'll just be working to a spec. It's either a systems analyst who just failed to consider the end user of the system, or it's a bean counter somewhere who thought they could save a few quid - even though it must cost them a lot more in handling customer queries.
Oh I feel so much better after a good rant
