It's Not Easy Not Being Green
Nov. 16th, 2011 11:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogSave the planet. Cut clutter. Have awesome sex until you're 95 and increase your track speed. All this and more if you just let us [us= your bank/utility/phone company/whatever] turn off your paper billing and allow us to enable you to "go paperless."
Don't believe a word of it. Until and unless they start rebating you at least 44 cents for every paper statement they don't send you, you have nothing to gain and everything to lose by this effort. They [they=pretty much all of them, which work the scam pretty much the same way] started out with pitching convenience: No stamps to buy or paper checks! (Fine- I don't mind PAYING online but I still want that statementy proof of what I paid, for tax and other legal purposes.) Then they went to guilt: You're making Poor Mother Earth sad, by making us cut down all those virgin-forest trees to send you something you're legally entitled to! (Want to guess if the CEO's aren't still printing out hundreds of drafts and final multiple copies of their long-term, golden parachute-filled contracts or if they're getting them paperless? Nope, didn't think so.) Next, increasingly, annoyance: We won't let you pay online, or we'll force you through a half dozen nag screens, to get you to make the What Jesus Would Do Switch. And just now, a certain telephone company, with a name rhyming with "Satan, My Son," has upped the ante even more; by clicking "submit" on your payment, you are automatically enrolled in a "trial" of paperless. I clicked "submit" and then found the five extra clickies needed to unenroll. Fuck you and the digital subscriber line you rode in on.
Why am I so angry about this? Because they [again, they=pretty much all of them] also go out of their way to make "paperless" billing as inconvenient and undocumented as possible. They're constantly changing their login screens and procedures "for your security," which means that password managers either don't work at all or have to be constantly updated and/or hacked to save the time allegedly saved. TPC has also decreed that my Firefox 3.point.infinity-seven is no longer supported by them, even though I keep it current and protected. And if you get distracted or suffer a printer error and can't print your confirmation screen, there's no going back to retrieve it.
Especially with bank and credit card statements, though? At least for now, you have rights, and they're measured from when you receive your statement. Once you go paperless, you head into a void of uncertainty about when time periods start or stop ticking or even if they apply at all. Would you win in a court of law? Maybe- but if there's one thing that Miranda, Brown and Jane Roe all agree on, it's that you don't want YOUR name getting stuck on the case that ultimately decides that. It can get a lot more expensive than 44 cents.
Shit- forgot to print my confirmation page. Should've just sent them a gorram check.
Don't believe a word of it. Until and unless they start rebating you at least 44 cents for every paper statement they don't send you, you have nothing to gain and everything to lose by this effort. They [they=pretty much all of them, which work the scam pretty much the same way] started out with pitching convenience: No stamps to buy or paper checks! (Fine- I don't mind PAYING online but I still want that statementy proof of what I paid, for tax and other legal purposes.) Then they went to guilt: You're making Poor Mother Earth sad, by making us cut down all those virgin-forest trees to send you something you're legally entitled to! (Want to guess if the CEO's aren't still printing out hundreds of drafts and final multiple copies of their long-term, golden parachute-filled contracts or if they're getting them paperless? Nope, didn't think so.) Next, increasingly, annoyance: We won't let you pay online, or we'll force you through a half dozen nag screens, to get you to make the What Jesus Would Do Switch. And just now, a certain telephone company, with a name rhyming with "Satan, My Son," has upped the ante even more; by clicking "submit" on your payment, you are automatically enrolled in a "trial" of paperless. I clicked "submit" and then found the five extra clickies needed to unenroll. Fuck you and the digital subscriber line you rode in on.
Why am I so angry about this? Because they [again, they=pretty much all of them] also go out of their way to make "paperless" billing as inconvenient and undocumented as possible. They're constantly changing their login screens and procedures "for your security," which means that password managers either don't work at all or have to be constantly updated and/or hacked to save the time allegedly saved. TPC has also decreed that my Firefox 3.point.infinity-seven is no longer supported by them, even though I keep it current and protected. And if you get distracted or suffer a printer error and can't print your confirmation screen, there's no going back to retrieve it.
Especially with bank and credit card statements, though? At least for now, you have rights, and they're measured from when you receive your statement. Once you go paperless, you head into a void of uncertainty about when time periods start or stop ticking or even if they apply at all. Would you win in a court of law? Maybe- but if there's one thing that Miranda, Brown and Jane Roe all agree on, it's that you don't want YOUR name getting stuck on the case that ultimately decides that. It can get a lot more expensive than 44 cents.
Shit- forgot to print my confirmation page. Should've just sent them a gorram check.
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no subject
Date: 2011-11-17 02:48 am (UTC)