If you want to redefine miserable, you should take a look at banks and their web usage. Has any of the programmers who created this garbage pile received any minimal training? My latest "fun": the practical, low-tech TAN form is being discontinued. Now there's only Smart-TAN via code cards and such stupid devices. Okay, it should actually work - generating session passwords isn't exactly new. But of course, that doesn't work either. Why would it? That would be silly. I mean, honestly, did anyone expect anything different? And of course, my TAN usage is now blocked. Because, it's so incredibly secure when you install technology that doesn't work, and then people are forcibly locked out.
But that's not the reason that bothers me so much. The reason? The bank's notification form. A simple form with a text field in the browser. So far so good. You enter text, which goes directly to the customer advisor. Also good. I mean, that's all I want - write text and that's it. And what happens? I get the great message:
The text is too long. The text may only contain 11 lines with 36 characters each.
Excuse me? Hello? Have you ever seen a text field in a web browser? Is there a column ruler somewhere? Or have you ever heard of flowing text? Should I seriously now manually break my lines to a maximum of 36 characters (which I have to count, as the input field gives me no help) by hand? Have you all lost your minds in the data center?
Oh, and then, after I've formatted and counted (with editor support and cut-and-paste):
This text contains invalid characters. It may only contain digits, letters, umlauts, and an arbitrary and ill-considered selection of special characters.
Parentheses - which you might use when you include a note - no, they are evil and must not be used.
Sorry, but this is a total failure. And no, I don't want to hear anything about your downstream banking system only accepting 11 lines of 36 characters - I don't care as a customer. Giving that as a reason only shows how stupid you are and how little you know about the subject. Sorry, colleagues, but this is pathetic.