Aurigny latest: general shitfrastructure worshipping

Prev: <https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/3352794691445397639/6820438698449558255>.

After sitting in Aurigny's phone queue for 26 minutes, I had a brief conversation where I summarised the situation.  I had been trying to buy a ticket using my account, and Aurigny had discarded their customer passwords, forcing resets by email, and the customer had to pretend they had forgotten the password, even tho it was Aurigny which had forgotten the password.  But the email had not arrived, a couple of hours later.

The rep helpfully pointed out that I could check out as a guest, and I agreed, while also remarking on  the amount of information that would have to be re-entered.

The rep said: have you checked your junk folder.  No.  I checked it.  The reset email was not in there.  She said: have you added no-reply@aurigny.com to your allowed senders list?  We are entering the realm of a kind of ritualised, yet extremely primitive, and misdirected, form of worship, of the arbitrary quirks and bad "best practices", that happen to surround a happens-to-be, yet unfit-for-purpose, communication system.

How did we get here?  From trying to buy a plane ticket, to tending to the shortcomings of email, in a speculative, forlorn, yet hopeful kind of a way, adding an address to a whitelist, when there is no indication that its absence from a whitelist has anything to do with the problem?  More to the point, how did this end up depending on email?  It wouldn't have depended on email, but Aurigny made it depend on email, by forcing account resets, via email.  This is a bit like a pilot lobbing a spanner into the engine just before take-off.  In other words, silly.

I said: if the next step is adding "no-reply@aurigny.com" to a whitelist in the hope that that helps, then I am out, I am going to find another way to travel.

I don't commute on Aurigny, but I did fly dozens of times in the last year with them.  Maybe if they weren't so subsidised by the local government, they would have to care about commercial considerations, like retaining customers, being able to sell tickets, and so on.