TAP Portugal, your-my perspective schism, spam spam spam, Confirmation required, but possible success

In the previous installment of failing to buy a flight ticket from TAP Air Portugal, we determined that the proximal cause of flytap.com's most recent failure to create a new account was our use of plus addressing in an email address, which I'd used as part of a workaround because TAP Air Portugal web site wasn't allowing login with the original account, nor for "rescue" of the account.

I needed to provision a new special-purpose shitfrastructure email address, so I thought I'd try icreatedthisaddressbecausetapairportugalereretarded@gmail.com, but this was too long, so I tried tapairportugalareretarded@gmail.com, which is equivalent to tap.air.portugal.are.retarded@gmail.com, because of the normalisation google do with dots, which is fine.

I kept switching from Portuguese to English, and the google web sites like accounts.google.com kept switching back, but this didn't matter too much.  My browser does send my language with every request, and if a user has explicitly selected a language, then it's not hard to persist this, so a company that was any good at the web would not do this, but never mind.

I have to link my account to a mobile during provisioning, so I enter a mobile number, and transcribe the code from my mobile to the google account creation page like a good automatom.

Now I have to log in.  It logs in, briefly shows my inbox, for less than a second in total, and then I'm sent to the login page again (in Portuguese).  There is no indication that I've been logged out or what is up with the account.  I go through this cycle a few more times.  I've seen the behaviour before when I've been locked out of a google account.  In the past it's gone away when I've confirmed, from some other email they hold for me, that it was indeed me trying to log in.

I try out a slightly different username and a different mobile number and it looks like the new google account is created successfully.  But on going to gmail, I get the same insta-logout with no reason given behaviour.

I am not going to be able to provision a special gmail.com email address for this purchase.

What was I trying to do again?  Buy an airline ticket.  Right, so I provision an email address on a domain I have via the Gandi registrar, and try to register on flytap.com using chromium browser and that email address.  Five minutes later the email isn't showing up.  Email was never designed to be instant, it's store-and-forward and asynchronous, so why is everyone's process switching between the web and email as if this doesn't break workflows?

But I've found a contacts page:

I send an email to customer@tapmilesandgo.com expressing my wish to purchase and summarising the issues.

Meanwhile, the email has arrived, and it's back to the web.  I choose a password, and, no way, "Your registration is complete!".  Something worked.  There is still a long way to go on this project.  The Great Filter on this kind of endeavor is always the payment stage.

Selecting a flight, I notice that the page on which I select my flight does not have the date of the flight, just the time:

Flight booking web sites usually display the date on every page, don't they?  The customer wants to double-check, and triple-check, that the date is correct.  They form a little hypothesis in their mind, that the date shown is going to match their idea of what date, and they're all comforted when this happens at each stage.

The page screenshat above contains times-of-day, without dates.

I am not shown the date again during the process until after payment.  When entering the payment details, I hope that the date I originally entered was correct.

It apparently more or less succeeded.  It gets me to agree to showing the credit card at the airport on the day, and then the "success" page is entitled "Confirmation required":

As illustrated, the page has been greyed out by the marketing department, who have ensured a spam-up is on top.  Such is the degeneration of every aspect of a service by the marketing department.

By fortuitous layout, rather than any kind of repentance by the marketing department, the only information obscured by the spam-up is more garbage from the marketing department.  There are several useful pieces of information hiding in the greyed-out-by-spam background: the exact meaning of "Confirmation required", a booking reference, and a summary of the flight times, including, this time, the date.

Looking first at the "Confirmation required", above the foreground spam from the marketing department, and greyed out by the marketing department, it does sound like payment really went through.  They want some kind of further "validation" of the credit card before I can check in.  It sounds like I can just do this at a checkin desk, which sounds fine, but there it does imply there is an online option, which presumably doesn't work, but one could try it.

They say something about printing it out, but I don't have a printer, so I'm going to write down the booking reference and bring my card to checkin, and hope I'm allowed to check in.

While we're on "Confirmation required", it does suffer from the "your-my" perspective schism common in very very badly-designed services.  This is a whole service-design topic in itself, but the history is something like this.  Someone at Microsoft in the 90s called a folder with their own documents "My Documents", and found that pretty useful, and why not, but they then thought that everyone else, instead of calling their own folders things like "My Documents", should just have a folder already called exactly "My Documents".  Now, I have encountered 2-year-olds who are thoroughly confused about this whole your-my thing, and it's interesting, because whether it's your or my depends on the speaker, so it's hard to point out, in a "your plate", "no, your plate", "yes, your plate, that's what I said" kind of way.  But the point is, I have not seen this go beyond 2.  They just catch on.  So it's not some kind of bombasm to say that service developers perpetrating the "your-my" schism are retarded.  They are literally without an intellectual capability, the capability to distinguish between the meaning of your and my based on the speaker, reached by everyone else before or at the age of 2.  These people are retarded, and they are all put in charge of "designing" web sites or other service elements, in which it is crucial to distinguish between "your" and "my".

I have had support calls, as a customer, where the person tells me to look in their something-or-other, and I say I don't have access to your something-or-other, and they say no, your my something-or-other.  So you mean my something or other?  Yes, that's what I said!

And instead of realising how stupid it is, it spreads, like horses sucking air.  It's probably described as "best practice" somewhere.  It's a meme, a pathological meme.

And it's never more clearly stupid than when "your" and "my" appear next to each other, and someone can screenshoot it and draw little red ellipses around.

 

 

 

Moving to the next useful informatino section, greyed out by the marketing department, directly above the spam-up from the marketing department, are some flight details.  These include confirmation of the date (good, my gamble in continuing earlier when it wasn't displayed paid off) and the booking ref called here "Reservation Code".

Hang on, didn't they call it "booking reference" before?  So is this here reservation code the same thing as, or different from, the thing called earlier booking reference?

I'll bring my reservation code and hope that that will suffice for any situations that require my booking reference.

Finally, below the main spam-up from the marketing department, and greyed out by the marketing department, is a box with some more flight info.  It would have been nice to have included the seat number of the seat I've reserved here.  And the information represented by hieroglyphics would be better done as text.  The string "2 checked bags maximum 32kg each" (or whatever it is) is useful; a picture of a case with wheels (but probably no brakes) is not so useful.  And that's one of the easier-to-interpret hieroglyphs.  Does the one fourth from the right mean it's not going to land tail-first in a cordonned-off area?

Anyway, I think I've more or less bought a ticket, so I'm more or less at the conclusion of this three-day project.