All my personal details were unchanged, I wanted the same password, same memorable word and same postal address. In fact the ONLY thing to change was the card number which the credit card company should know, (they sent me the card after all !?).
Anyway, I put it off for day or two (secretly hoping the credit card company would see sense and just reactivate my current account) and inevitably finally relented yesterday. Little did I know my troubles had only just begun…
The credit card online registration process is a masterclass in How NOT to design web forms
. The bulk of the problems were due to the address entry field, which includes an automatic postcode look-up service. Very good. However, after carefully filling the entire form out and submitting I was presented with the following:
Curious. I was sure I hadn’t made a mistake, but trusting their system I scrolled down to find the following:
The problem is I don’t live on a street with a standard street name, I live on a B road with a B road name. Even though it is unnecessary information I entered the name of the B road and, would you believe it, was presented with this:
So, in the world of online banking everyone in the UK lives on a street and that street has a purely alphabetical name. In an act of desperation if decided the only way I was going to get online banking back was to tell the form what it wanted to hear. I entered a single letter (the letter t
) and clicked submit… again. Here’s the error message:
Great. Lost for words I decided to enter a random, alphabetical and multiple character string. The fatal blow:
So, having spent wasted almost an hour on a task that was unnecessary in the first place, I still do not have online banking. In order to have online banking you must live on a very well named street, alphabetical only and more than one letter. Be warned.
