Magazines & Passwords (Provoking the Opposite)

Last month (November) I received renewal notices for two magazines I enjoy and to which I intend to keep my subscriptions. What drives me nuts is that the subscription are good until May in one case and July in the other!

Why do they do that? Do they think we won't notice that the renewal offer is 6-8 months early? Do they think we'll just say "yes" to every notice that arrives, and with any luck they'll have us signed up for 5 or 6 years before we notice anything?

Well, guess what? Being a person of discernment and taste (and who else would subscribe to such fine rags), I do notice! And I think it's pretty silly to renew in November for a subscription that's good until next July! So, behaving as a rational person, I ignore the renewal offer. When the next one comes, I ignore that one, too. In fact, I'll probably keep ignoring renewal offers until it finally dawns that the magazine has stopped coming! That's when I'll renew, maybe after missing 2 or 3 issues. This seems a perfectly rational way to deal with problem. I imagine the magazine would rather have me as a continuous and uninterrupted subscriber, yet my "reminding" too often and too early, they provoke the opposite outcome.

This reminds me of the problem with changing passwords. Online companies let you set a user name and password and leave it unchanged for years, but the IT departments of most companies insist that employees change their passwords every 2 or 3 months, ostensibly in the interest of better security.

Changing your password every 3 months sounds good in theory -- if you have only one account in world. But what if you live in the real world? In that case, you probably have 50-100 accounts, each with its own password and user name. You can make this plenitude of accounts less onerous by using the same name and password for multiple accounts. But if your IT department insists that you change passwords every 3 months, how do you keep track of them? Most people write them down -- in a file on the computer or PDA, on a white board, or on post-it notes displayed prominently on the monitor for any and all too see.

With so many passwords to remember, this is a perfectly rationale way of coping with the changing-password demand. Of course, it must also be admitted that it has the opposite effect of the intended purpose. Rather than improving security, forcing users to change passwords makes security weaker, since everyone has to find some coping mechanism for dealing with the short expiration. Under the flag of strengthening security, this practice actually weakens it.

More Wacky E-Z Pass Adventures

I ruminated previously about the oddities of E-Z Pass and their conceptions of customer service as expressed in their computer systems.

Recently I had to make changes in my E-Z Pass account, and once again I was struck by their strange view of the world as revealed in their technology.

I had a simply need. Having recently changed jobs, I no longer needed the "commuter special" for crossing a Hudson River bridge every day, but now I needed to sign up for a discount program for daily travel on the New York State Thruway. All I had to do was cancel the bridge discount and sign up for the Thruway discount. Should be simple, right? Should be able to do both online, right?

Nope, wrong on both counts.

E-Z Pass comes close to offering an efficient and user-friendly means for canceling a bridge commuter plan, but they couldn't bring themselves to go all the way. There is nothing on the website, but on the phone system, you can "suspend" a bridge discount. Not cancel, mind you, but suspend until a specified date. OK, I thought, I can deal with that. I'll just pick a date after I'm dead -- say, January 1, 2082. The system, fussy enough to reject a Start date of yesterday, had no problem committing to resume service 75 years in the future. OK, I thought, if that's the way around it, fine -- at least I accomplished my goal. But as I was thinking this, I suddenly heard the E-Z Pass voice system explaining that my plan would suspended until the date requested OR until the next time I went across the bridge, at which time it would start up again! So, even if you suspend it for 75 years, the system knows better and will undo your instructions if you ever set foot on the bridge again!

On the phone finally with a real person, the E-Z Pass customer service associate found my 75-year suspension amusing but admitted that it was rather odd that you couldn't simply cancel it in the automated system. That required a personal conversation, and she agreed to take care of it.

When it comes to a Thruway discount, however, a mere phone call is not enough. It turns out the only way to sign up for that program is by sending them a letter in the U.S. Mail! E-Z Pass needs no additional information -- they already have my credit card number for replenishing the account whenever their comfort demands it. I can only imagine their rationale: "It's just that, we don't know, with a Thruway, it's so big and everything, somehow a letter seems better." If anyone has a more coherent theory, let me know!

These ARE the Good Old Days

People often fret about how information technology is changing our lives, and it's easy to fret about the negative aspects, but really, there are always gains and losses. Yes, hardly anyone writes proper letters any more, but people can communicate more quickly and more often! The advent of Federal Express meant that the "grace period" between sending an important package and its receipt his disappeared - and now everybody wants everything yesterday!

Personally, I miss the old impact printers, which took an hour to print out a 20-page document; before background printing, there was nothing else to do while printing was in progress. The great thing was that it forced you to take a break and relax a little - and yet you were actually working, making progress, during this time. Sort of like playing shuffleboard while making your way across the Atlantic on a ship!

Some day, our grandchildren will listen with amazement as we explain that, in our lifetime, the world was such a freewheeling, innocent, Wild West sort of the place that it was perfectly normal for people to:

• Hop into a car and drive where ever they wanted - and if they changed their minds, just go off in some other direction!
• Enjoy a complete absence of advertising in so many places, like our cars, refrigerators, golf clubs, security alarms - you name it.
• Actually fill out paper applications for drivers' licenses, passports, and voter registration. All kinds of people had fake document created, and it sometimes took years to track them down.
• Pay bills after you got the money into your account.
• Tell people "the check is in the mail." People actually believed this! (Well, the first time, anyway.)
  
• Not answer the phone! Really! If someone didn't want to talk, they could just not answer!
• Lie about location! Back in the day, you could fly off to Vegas or wherever, then call in to the office with a groggy voice and say, "I'm not feeling well - I won't be in today." Back in those days, the boss had no way of knowing where you actually were when you called in sick - how cool was that!
• If you passed a pretty girl, you couldn't just query her ID and send her a signal of interest. Nobody had implants back then! If you didn't know her, you had to accost her directly (pretty scary), or follow her around and see who else knew her, and ask them what her name was, and where she lived, and was she married or not. Romance involved a lot of pure legwork back in the day!

So, rather than fretting about these piddly little invasions of privacy we experience today, let's all enjoy the wide-open frontier free-for-all that life today will appear to be in another generation or so! Let's just hop in that car and go... anywhere!