Official Vent Thread

MLS REALLY needs to stop their thumbnail nonsense for the highlight videos... The team on the thumbnail won the game. And if both teams are on the thumbnail then it ended as a tie.
 
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MLS REALLY needs to stop their thumbnail nonsense for the highlight videos... The team on the thumbnail won the game. And if both teams are on the thumbnail then it ended as a tie.
I can’t say for certain I know which thumbnails you’re talking about. But I’m pretty positive the MLS pass thumbnails are usually just a player from the home team
 
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I can’t say for certain I know which thumbnails you’re talking about. But I’m pretty positive the MLS pass thumbnails are usually just a player from the home team
Youtube videos, sry should have been more specific. They used to just have both team logos w a background. Now they include some player pictures and it basically gives it away. Why?
 
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Youtube videos, sry should have been more specific. They used to just have both team logos w a background. Now they include some player pictures and it basically gives it away. Why?

i hate it too. i also hate it when they put the score in the video title or use a title that makes who won very obvious or gives away what happens.. i don't want to know it was an 8 goal thriller. i want to be surprised.
 
Nothing works any more.

After about 27 years of service Con Ed stopped billing us last October. No new bills on paper or in the online account. We realized it in late winter and tried to get them to start issuing bills but they could not make it happen. I tried dozens of calls, emails, and Twitter messages. I filled out special forms. Reps would claim they fixed it but they were wrong. Eventually I contacted my NYS Assembly member and the PSC. Normal people contact the PSC because they want a lower bill. I just wanted a bill. Eventually the PSC pressure forced Con Ed to assign someone hyper-competent to clear the logjam and things are back on track as of July. We received about 8 bills in the mail in one day.

My Health Savings Account through work switched to a new bank and custodian and a new access portal from yet another company. I needed to print a PDF portfolio statement last month because my wife is a reporting person at another financial company, and she needs to disclose. I could not figure out how to do so. So I emailed the HSA company and they went beyond the 2 business day turn around. When I pressed them, they said they were trying to get the new portal company to generate a statement for me because the HSA company could not even find where the option to view and print or download statements was hidden. I've been viewing and printing portfolio statements for 25 years and these fools broke it. Days later I directly contacted the portal company and they showed me where they hid the access statements function in 4 hours. It was in my Personal Profile section. On every other web account I have, the Profile section holds the personal info I supply to the vendor, including name, address, beneficiaries, contact details and other personal information I provide and might need to change from time to time. Account statements are under Dashboard, or Documents, or Wallet, or Investments. They hid it so well that the HSA company still has not figured it out more than 2 weeks later (they have no idea I bypassed them and went directly to the Portal vendor). This is basic stuff. How does the HSA company not know where basic account info is located on the portal they chose? Why does the Portal company go against 3 decades of web conventions?

Same problem for another investment account associated with my company supplied life insurance benefit. They do not list fund ticker symbols on either the portfolio of fund fact sheets, and my wife needs the symbols. So I email that provider, and for verification the rep wants my DOB, address, telephone number and hiring date, and she wants me to put this confidential info in an email. All I want are non-confidential ticker symbols. I can't look them up because the funds are special institutional class versions and it's impossible to tell which one is which but it's still public information. Just give it to me. Even better, include them in the portfolio statement or fund fact sheets I can access with dealing with a CS rep.

Through a sequence of events my secondary backup bank merged into my primary so I have 2 checking accounts in one bank now. I tried to order checks for the transferred account and, yes, it would not work. The turnkey process let me get to the last step before informing me it could not handle this account and I should call an 877 number. So I call the number input the routing and account numbers and the phone system also says it cannot handle it. So I email customer support and the rep is nice but again she wants me to manually provide a ton of information that the automated check ordering system pulls automatically, when it works. Which it has worked at this bank for yes, 25+ years. But now it's broken and requires manual input both from me and a CS rep. All of tech is gaga over AI but all the legacy systems that handled basic non-AI stuff like generating electric bills and ordering checks is broken.

NYCFC won its first six games against FC Cincinnatti with a combined goal differential of 17. Then they tied the next two, and have now lost 4 straight across MLS and Leagues Cup, including last night's fiasco collapse.

This used to be a proper country.
 
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Nothing works any more.

After about 27 years of service Con Ed stopped billing us last October. No new bills on paper or in the online account. We realized it in late winter and tried to get them to start issuing bills but they could not make it happen. I tried dozens of calls, emails, and Twitter messages. I filled out special forms. Reps would claim they fixed it but they were wrong. Eventually I contacted my NYS Assembly member and the PSC. Normal people contact the PSC because they want a lower bill. I just wanted a bill. Eventually the PSC pressure forced Con Ed to assign someone hyper-competent to clear the logjam and things are back on track as of July. We received about 8 bills in the mail in one day.

My Health Savings Account through work switched to a new bank and custodian and a new access portal from yet another company. I needed to print a PDF portfolio statement last month because my wife is a reporting person at another financial company, and she needs to disclose. I could not figure out how to do so. So I emailed the HSA company and they went beyond the 2 business day turn around. When I pressed them, they said they were trying to get the new portal company to generate a statement for me because the HSA company could not even find where the option to view and print or download statements was hidden. I've been viewing and printing portfolio statements for 25 years and these fools broke it. Days later I directly contacted the portal company and they showed me where they hid the access statements function in 4 hours. It was in my Personal Profile section. On every other web account I have, the Profile section holds the personal info I supply to the vendor, including name, address, beneficiaries, contact details and other personal information I provide and might need to change from time to time. Account statements are under Dashboard, or Documents, or Wallet, or Investments. They hid it so well that the HSA company still has not figured it out more than 2 weeks later (they have no idea I bypassed them and went directly to the Portal vendor). This is basic stuff. How does the HSA company not know where basic account info is located on the portal they chose? Why does the Portal company go against 3 decades of web conventions?

Same problem for another investment account associated with my company supplied life insurance benefit. They do not list fund ticker symbols on either the portfolio of fund fact sheets, and my wife needs the symbols. So I email that provider, and for verification the rep wants my DOB, address, telephone number and hiring date, and she wants me to put this confidential info in an email. All I want are non-confidential ticker symbols. I can't look them up because the funds are special institutional class versions and it's impossible to tell which one is which but it's still public information. Just give it to me. Even better, include them in the portfolio statement or fund fact sheets I can access with dealing with a CS rep.

Through a sequence of events my secondary backup bank merged into my primary so I have 2 checking accounts in one bank now. I tried to order checks for the transferred account and, yes, it would not work. The turnkey process let me get to the last step before informing me it could not handle this account and I should call an 877 number. So I call the number input the routing and account numbers and the phone system also says it cannot handle it. So I email customer support and the rep is nice but again she wants me to manually provide a ton of information that the automated check ordering system pulls automatically, when it works. Which it has worked at this bank for yes, 25+ years. But now it's broken and requires manual input both from me and a CS rep. All of tech is gaga over AI but all the legacy systems that handled basic non-AI stuff like generating electric bills and ordering checks is broken.

NYCFC won its first six games against FC Cincinnatti with a combined goal differential of 17. Then they tied the next two, and have now lost 4 straight across MLS and Leagues Cup, including last night's fiasco collapse.

This used to be a proper country.
I’m too young to remember preinternet days, but boy I really hate how automated customer services calls are and how useless the automations are with regards to anything. I’ve never had an experience where the robot has actually gotten me what I need and had to then tell a human (if you can get one) all the information I already fed the robot over the phone. Plus the different CS people I talked to were all incompetent and basically lied to me every billing cycle for close to a year saying that the problem should be solved. The only reason it was ever solved was because I accidentally got sent to a CS rep who works with corporations instead of those that work with individuals who had a brain in her head. I wasted close to 48 hours of my life on phone calls and hold and answers the same questions over and over and being lied to by people trying to pretend to be confident. Basically a waste of time.

I recently listened to a podcast (sorry Mark) where the host was explaining a story about how a customer service branch of a company noticed that their employees were getting too stressed by phone calls and demand. And instead of choosing the most beneficial options like hiring more reps, or giving more leave, or mental health help. They chose a more cost effective approach where they installed AI in the employee computers to monitor the employees and gauge when the employee is stress. And when the employee hits a threshold, the computer starts playing a “relaxing song” and show “tropical sceneries” to help sooth the employees for a couple minutes so they can get back to work. I wish I knew what the outcome of that was, but my guess is it was bad.
 
Maximizing shareholder value really has gotten out of hand. Spend a little more and improve customer satisfaction.
Perhaps, improving customer satisfaction will keep customers and add more, meaning more money staying and coming in which *gasp* increases shareholder value.
 
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Perhaps, improving customer satisfaction will keep customers and add more, meaning more money staying and coming in which *gasp* increases shareholder value.
how DARE you! we need more shareholder value IMMEDIATELY!

...it's insane. it really is
 
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Maximizing shareholder value really has gotten out of hand. Spend a little more and improve customer satisfaction.
That's part of it, but there's a lot more going on. My check ordering issue is probably just not spending the $$ to reprogram and integrate systems.

But, I believe the missing fund symbols and hidden portfolio statements are at least partially a result of financial companies reacting to low-info customers and choosing to infantilize them further. The reason it's impossible to get out of a phone menu is 80% of calls are people who want to ask what their balance is and can I read you my checking account number to pay my bill. Hiding ticker symbols and detailed portfolios prevents customers from calling to ask why the Fidelity Equity Income fund in this account through my employer has a different ticker symbol and share price than I see at Fidelity. Most people just look at the colorful graph that says the fund is X% of their portfolio, is worth $Y and went up Z% year over year. Plus the HSA portal designers clearly have a fetish for clean, white blank space design, which can be pretty but first needs to be functional.

ConEd is a study in government meddling and failure. During Covid I had a daughter in a NYC public HS, where everyone is entitled to free lunches regardless of income but they still demand an income verification form. When they closed for Covid, they decided to send every public school family regardless of income an EBT benefit card loaded with hundreds of dollars of grocery funds, and then automatically reload it every few months. I could not refuse it or return it. For a while we bought extra and donated to our church food pantry but they eventually said it was too much! So we just took the free groceries. But shortly after we got the EBT card we were also automatically enrolled in the Home Energy Assistance Program and started receiving subsidized Con Ed bills (but not subsidized National Grid who delivers the natural gas that actually heats our home, but whatever). Con Ed said it's impossible; they get a list from various government agencies and they have to enroll us. I’m confident we were put on the list because we were given the EBT cards. So we pushed, both my wife and I, and we were removed from the program, which lasted a few months until we received notice we were re-enrolled. So we pushed again, and filled out special forms, and Con Ed kept trying to dissuade us and then they just stopped sending us bills. There's so much GD fraud and if you try to be honest the system just crushes you.

Also the PSC told Con Ed that when they finally resumed billing me that Con Ed had waived the right to collect all the bills that were issued months late so we were gifted about 8-9 months of completely free electricity. Con Ed's profit margin is both fixed and guaranteed by the state so every other ratepayer in lower New York contributed.
Thank you.
 
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That's part of it, but there's a lot more going on. My check ordering issue is probably just not spending the $$ to reprogram and integrate systems.

But, I believe the missing fund symbols and hidden portfolio statements are at least partially a result of financial companies reacting to low-info customers and choosing to infantilize them further. The reason it's impossible to get out of a phone menu is 80% of calls are people who want to ask what their balance is and can I read you my checking account number to pay my bill. Hiding ticker symbols and detailed portfolios prevents customers from calling to ask why the Fidelity Equity Income fund in this account through my employer has a different ticker symbol and share price than I see at Fidelity. Most people just look at the colorful graph that says the fund is X% of their portfolio, is worth $Y and went up Z% year over year. Plus the HSA portal designers clearly have a fetish for clean, white blank space design, which can be pretty but first needs to be functional.

ConEd is a study in government meddling and failure. During Covid I had a daughter in a NYC public HS, where everyone is entitled to free lunches regardless of income but they still demand an income verification form. When they closed for Covid, they decided to send every public school family regardless of income an EBT benefit card loaded with hundreds of dollars of grocery funds, and then automatically reload it every few months. I could not refuse it or return it. For a while we bought extra and donated to our church food pantry but they eventually said it was too much! So we just took the free groceries. But shortly after we got the EBT card we were also automatically enrolled in the Home Energy Assistance Program and started receiving subsidized Con Ed bills (but not subsidized National Grid who delivers the natural gas that actually heats our home, but whatever). Con Ed said it's impossible; they get a list from various government agencies and they have to enroll us. So we pushed, both my wife and I, and we were removed from the program, which lasted a few months until we received notice we were re-enrolled. So we pushed again, and filled out special forms, and Con Ed kept trying to dissuade us and then they just stopped sending us bills. There's so much GD fraud and if you try to be honest the system just crushes you.

Also the PSC told Con Ed that when they finally resumed billing me that Con Ed had waived the right to collect all the bills that were issued months late so we were gifted about 8-9 months of completely free electricity. Con Ed's profit margin is both fixed and guaranteed by the state so every other ratepayer in lower New York contributed.
Thank you.
You’re welcome. You can buy me a beer before the next game.
 
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