ttj - Tom Jones

  Here's an error from airbnb. Note the cheesy denial that anything has failed.  "Let's try that again".  Oh, everything sounds fine.  I mean, I don't have a house booked, and I'm one hour of hard admin into trying to have a house booked, but nothing's really gone wrong, it's just let's try that again. Followed by "There is something wrong with your Host's calendar".  At this point they are not my Host, and it looks like they're not going to be my Host.  They are someone who listed something on your web site, and the booking failed, so "your Host" is rather a stretch.  But this putative Host, it is their fault.  There is something wrong with their calendar.  Whatever is wrong with "Host"'s calendar, sounds like it was impossible to detect before I went through the payment process.  At the point where I don't know if payment's been taken from my card or not, there is now "something wrong with yo...

 I went thru the ordeal of completing the UK's Passenger Locator Form, and took some notes on usability.  But usability quibbles are irrelevant compared to their web site just not working, same as most web sites:     This is a special message from the UK government about their competence: It's a legal requirement for entry, you are not allowed to board without it, but it doesn't work, because no one's web site works. Now that web site interactions are legal requirements for moving around, rather than "nice-to-have"s, is anyone going to start admitting, that, to a first approximation, NONE OF THEM FUCKING WORK? So, I guess I'll try again later, then.  If it's not working by early in the morning, I'll have to decide whether to make a probably futile trip to Munich Airport, or just stay at home and ask for a refund on the flight ticket and the covid test.  And cancel all my appointments in the UK.

The background is that I sold a few kilos of gold for CHF, and wanted it in EUR, so I used IB's forex to get it from CHF to EUR at good rates.  Simple right?  Well, it touches on the non-working financial system in several different places, so no, it's certainly not simple, it's an ordeal.  The particular section of the ordeal dealt with here is the seizure of my funds by IB.  The other major part of the ordeal so far is Sparkasse's Kafkaesque handling of giving permission for the EUR to land in their account, which is out of scope here. Like so many things, the problem comes down to authentication.   The general problem is that businesses are generally unable to authenticate their own customers, and this is a competence issue.  This is often accompanied by adhoc and incorrectly-designed processes to sort-of "authenticate" customers, outside what the customer was led to believe constitutes the normal authentication process.   The specific pro...