Internet Inanity

For all that I thought I had left the notion of ‘technology for technology’s sake’ when I left teaching, I was proven wrong today.

Before I proceed, perhaps it’s best I explained what this notion is all about.

[Steps on soapbox]

If there’s an old (read: pen and paper) method of recording/ updating information, teachers will invariably be forced to use the computerised versions of said methods. Never mind that computers and servers are known to ‘go down’ every once in a while (or every once in a short while if the system is a Microsoft product) and all that has been entered will be lost and there will be much gnashing of teacherly teeth; never mind that the pen is sometimes faster than the two-fingered typing of some teachers (because we teachers have so much time on our hands, we need something like this to slow us down); never mind that when 20,000 teachers in Singapore log on to the same server at the same time (usually when the results of exams, which take place at about the same time in every school in Singapore, need to be keyed in after said exams have been administered to 125,000 students, marked and returned), the server usually finds it most opportune to have its latest breakdown.

We use Powerpoint (or Keynote) not because it’s the most effective way to teach students, but because it becomes part of the 30% of curriculum time that must be devoted to the use of IT. Who cares if it actually takes some teachers longer to create the presentation than the presentation itself?

At my old school, teachers had to enter marks of students over and over again because the various programmes simply refused to allow for all the different permutations of academic recording. In the end, these same teachers ended up making their own calculations on their trusty old calculators and then entering the final marks into the system.

Which usually promptly screws them up. Then, it’s rinse and repeat time.

Why? All for the sake of technology. Not technology that helps us and aids us in reducing time spent on everything else so that we can focus on teaching, but for technology that looks good on someone’s resume (“conceptualised and created system for calculating marks for students on all levels”).

And that’s what TFTS is.

[Steps off soapbox]

So today, I got an email from my ISP. It’s my online bill. Right. No problem. I’ll click on the handy link they’ve included in the bill. At the same time, I’ll just log onto my internet banking account and get ready to transfer the bill amount to the relevant people.

Easy.

After one hour of trying, this was the end product:

____________________________________________________

To whom it may concern:

I would like to revert to the old-tech way of receiving the hardcopy of my bill invoices please. Since I'd converted to receiving the bill online, I've, in fact, not received a bill online and not seen a bill at all until the good folks at Pacific Internet send me a nasty reminder telling me that I've been remiss in my payment.

However, before you next do that, please note the following:

1. The links to my bill information on the bill reminder emails that you send me are always broken. I've been getting nothing but HTTP 404 Errors since I'd started using this service.

2. If I try the manual method (ie, through the Pacific Internet homepage), the page never loads. All I get is a query on the browser about whether or not I wish to load a page with both secure and unsecure items, and when I click 'yes', it stops loading and nothing appears. Even after half an hour.

3. I was under the misguided impression that ‘receiving my bills though [my] email’ meant ‘receiving my bills through [my] email’. Apparently your definition is for customers to receive a bill invoice reminder and then to log in onto your homepage in order to see the actual bill. I can’t see how this is ‘more convenient than receiving [my] invoices through the mail’. Unless, of course, you meant ‘convenience for yourself’.

I thought to save the environment by having you print as few paper invoices as possible, but it appears that I was stupid and wrong to have done so. So please, I'd like to start receiving my invoices, as hardcopies, through the mail again from this day on.

Thank you.

____________________________________________________


What a bloody waste of time.