Crazy.

And it reminds me of an incident a few years ago when I was living the in the city centre of Manchester for several months. In the first week or so, I had no fixed internet, so I bought a wifi hotspot dongle from 3 (a mobile — cell — company in the UK). You had to prepay for data and could top up online or in store.

When it ran out, you couldn’t access any sites except the top-up page. Which was fine.

When it ran out, I went to the page to top up and put in my card details.

In the UK we have a system called 3D secure (not all countries use it but a lot do). For those who don’t know, it basically passes you to another site (often in an iframe) and you have to enter a password — or part of a password, ie, 1st, 4th and 5th characters etc — to confirm it’s you.

Can you tell where this is going?

3 allowed access to their page to pay, but had forgot to put access to the 3d secure site. Making it impossible to top-up online!

Thankfully as I was living in the centre I had a shop about 10 minutes walk away, so I got there (just before they closed for the day actually).

As I was explaining the problem — and topping up by voucher — a man behind the counter joined in. Turns out he was from the IT department responsible for the web site. He was just doing a tour of shops. Great timing!

He was — understandably — horrified about the situation and no doubt it made him realise why virtually no one was topping up online.

“Thanks so much, I’ll make sure it is fixed immediately!” he said — or similar.

I had occasion to use the dongle again some months later for a different use… I think you can guess what problem I faced…

:(