One of my tasks today was to change my address with all the folks that want to send me mail.
It’s 2024, and it seems as though this should be simple: just go to the Web site, and change the address associated with my account. Easy to do, and trivially easy for a minimally competent Web designer to implement. And yet, you already know where this is going.
In no particular order, except that I’m starting with the most horrific offender…
Comcast
For those living in blissful ignorance, Comcast is an American media company who also are (using the brand name Xfinity) the largest home internet service provider (ISP) in the US. ISP. Internet service provider. Yet, when I tried to just get to the login page (for either Comcast Business or Xfinity, whether I used the link saved in my password manager or the login link from their xfinity.com front page) what I got was:
That’s right: America’s largest ISP can’t even be bothered to keep their Web site running. I shouldn’t be surprised: my internet service at the mainland house was the second-worst service I have ever experienced. In case you’re wondering, the #1 spot also goes to Comcast. Why would I ever use them? They’re a monopoly. I literally had no choice at my location. At the office, I ended up spending thousands of dollars and many months to get a fiber line pulled to my premeses. I couldn’t do that at my home.
Medicare/Social Security
When I tried to change my address for Medicare, I was redirected to the Social Security Administration (SSA) Web site.
The SSA Web site worked, at least. I was able to sign in and fairly painlessly find the place where I could change my address. But wait…
When I tried to enter my mailing address, I got an error that I couldn’t use a PO box. That’s the only address I have! The USPS won’t deliver mail to my street address. Yet nothing I could do would fix it. An internet search revealed many others with the same problem — and no viable solutions.
So I called the SSA main telephone number and listened to repeated messages about how I should be using the (obviously broken) Web site. The whole phone call took over half an hour, but I do have to say that once I’d reached a human representative, she was fantastic and the problem was solved quickly and efficiently. But a half hour of listening to insipid hold music and disclaimers and exhortations that I should be using the BROKEN Web site was a bit much.
water utility
Well, there’s the water utility for the mainland house. Their Web site seems quite self-service oriented and you can do almost anything quickly… except change your mailing address. I sent them an email that, hours later, has gone unanswered.
auto/homeowner insurance company
They have a big, complicated Web site that does a lot of self-promotion about how you can take care of things yourself. Except I kept getting (very helpful) errors like this one:
Finally, the site just said I needed to “contact your agent” if I wanted to change my address. An email to my agency (which used to be great, but has enshittified into nothingness the last couple of years) has gone unanswered hours later.
coffee supplier
I have long gotten weekly deliveries of exceptional coffee. When I went to the Web site to change my address, though, I ended up in an infinite loop where clicking on the “change your address” link would take me to the “activate your subscription” (with the old shipping address) page. Over and over and over.
island property tax mailing address
I can view my bill, look up all kinds of laws, change various aspects of my account, even change my phone number. But mailing address? Nope. The only phone number listed actually went to their IT technical support, who were kind enough to give me a better number. The representative at that number was nice enough, while saying “that’s not something we can do over the phone.” She gave me a direct link to a form I can download, fill out, and mail in. Except that my printer is on the boat. She did accept the information via her direct email, however, and answered right away and helpfully. So a good experience overall, but why trips through half a dozen Web pages, two phone calls, and three emails to do something that should be trivially accomplished online?
building supply store
Well, I didn’t expect much here. They’re great folks, but they live in the IT dark ages. They have a Web site, and it purports to let you order online, but enter anything into their search (eg. “nails”) and it will say they don’t have any. When I first called to ask about it, they said that was because I didn’t have an account. So I created an account, which was an ordeal where they kept telling me to “just come by” to get the paperwork (lots of paperwork) sorted. The problem is that I was 2,500 miles and a big ocean away. Only after I got the account created (which is useful for other reasons) did I find out that, no, their online ordering system doesn’t work for anyone. Sigh. So I wasn’t surprised when their response to “how do I change my address?” was “just come by.” But even that hasn’t worked. I dropped off the change of address form months ago, but my latest order still billed to the outdated address.
Fidelity
This one was a surprise, as Fidelity tends to have excellent Web services. I first entered my street address, which hiccuped because it has a hyphen in it. I left out the hyphen and it worked, which I supposed doesn’t much matter as I can’t get mail delivered here anyway. But then I saw that it had changed my mailing address to my street address, where I cannot get mail. I tried to change that to my post office box. On a surreal form it displayed “Change MAILING address,” when I entered my PO box it just locked up saying “You cannot use a PO box for your STREET address.” It took a phone call (fortunately, a brief and friendly one) to get that fixed, though even the phone agent was unable to put the proper hyphen in my street address.
So I’ve now spent most of the day changing addresses on just a few accounts. It’s pretty basic, pedestrian function. Yet in the gigabytes of javascript crap I’ve had to download to view those oh-so-pretty pages, they couldn’t even perform this simple, fundamentally important task.
The World Wide Web is over thirty years old, and the state of Web development is… pathetic.
—2p
addendum 20240909@15:04
The Comcast Business web site is no longer giving errors. Now it’s just completely down and unreachable. “We’re the phone company. We don’t have to care.”