I’ve noticed that companies have a nasty tendency to try to deflect blame to other parties for any of their potential shortcomings.  A good example of this is the message you get when you try to login to your account on the Cingular website.

Of course, someone with a slow Internet connection would see slow response times, but I noticed that the page is polling while it waits for some backend system to respond.  On my fast Internet connection the page refreshes occur pretty quickly, so it becomes obvious to me that the real issue is their slow backend.  But rather than just acknowledge this, they have to try to blame the Internet connection.  If they’d just leave off the last part of the message it would be accurate and much less annoying.

The second instance of this was with the Verizon online account management system (hmm…. two phone companies… I wonder if there’s anything to be inferred from this?).  I had used the system to add Caller ID to my second phone line.  The system gave me confirmation that the change had been made (and it explicitly specified that the changes were for the second line; this would be important later).  The change should have only taken a day to make, so after a week I called Encore to enquire as to what happened.  The support rep discovered that Caller ID had been added to my primary line instead of the second line.  Rather than just fix the problem he had to try to blame it on me (!) by suggesting that I had selected the wrong thing on the website.  Given that the system makes you select the line at the start, and that I had printed confirmation, I was a bit miffed to be accused of incompetence.

I suppose it’s also interesting that I’ve never had a successful change go through on either the Cingular or Verizon account management website.  Every time I’ve tried to add or change features I’ve ended up having to call them in order to get the change to go through, regardless of what the website says.  You’d think I’d learn by now.  But I keep hoping that they’ll get it right so I can handle things without having to sit in a phone queue (or talking to a stupid robot) to get things done.