Bad Programming

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

-Arthur C. Clark

A quick post after roughly two hours of tax readings this morning. I had visions of knocking out a lecture or two online, but that will have to wait. A Friday spent immersed in an appellate brief lies ahead. Great stuff if the phone doesn't ring and I have time to think deeply about the issues being briefed. Bon chance.

Peg's messaged this morning, looking for the ABA Routing Number for an account to which she needs to arrange an ACH transfer. She'd searched the depositary bank's app, and as far as I know their browser-based page, with no success. I knew where it was, and sent that to her, but her point's well-taken that lately our lives have been mired in frustration and delay because so many institutional web pages are just so, so bad.

Just this week, I spent a chunk of a late afternoon complying with the Department of the Treasury's new beneficial ownership disclosure rules for companies doing business in the U.S. The Department has helpfully created a page that walks the representative of the company through a series of questions about who actually owns the enterprise, I suppose as a way of rooting out terrorists and the Chinese. Peg and I own two entities that fall under the new disclosure rules, so soon I found myself face-to-face with the BOI web questionnaire.

I breezed through the first filing. Well, sort of. The last page kept sending me back to prior pages where fields hadn't been populated because they were below the "Next" button at the bottom of the screen. Thus, it was possible to hit "next" without seeing onscreen that there were more questions on the page, just out of sight.

So I fixed all that, filed, and thereby became a federal criminal in my effort to avoid being a federal criminal by filing the report. You see, within one screen there was a tab, barely visible, for adding beneficial owners. I'd listed only myself as the owner of Wyldswood Farms, which wasn't true, because I didn't see a place to type in Peg's name. And I had sworn under penalty of perjury that the report was correct.

Knowing I look bad in orange (then again, who looks good in that garish color?), I found my way back to the website the first think next morning, and fixed the report.

I have a doctoral level education, and am reasonably proficient on the internet. I've designed a web page before. But this one almost made me into a felon. How is the average Joe going to handle this reporting requirement?

By paying someone else to do it, I reckon. We're seeing lots of requests at the firm these days, mostly from our homeowner association clients.

The FCC page is even worse, apparently designed by Soviet apparatchiks with no concept of how the internet works.

I found this out the hard way when I was thwarted again this year in my effort to obtain an FCC radio operator's license so Peg and I can fly to Canada.

A bit of history: back in the day, to fly an airplane with a two-way radio, you had to have a license both for yourself and for the airplane, sort of like HAM radio operators. The FAA wisely scrapped that one decades ago (maybe not so wisely, given that on every long flight I hear some yahoo blurt out a "Let's Go Brandon" on the guard frequency), unless . . . you want to fly to Canada. Then, because the Canadian system still calls for the old licenses, you need to apply with the FCC for a license for yourself and your plane.

I've tried to complete this ordeal each spring we've owned the Columbia, trying to fulfill Peg's desire to fly to Quebec City (1 hour) versus driving there (6 hours), but have failed every time. The licensing portal, as it turns out, is a standalone URL, which in turn requires that fields be filled with information from ANOTHER FCC website. The two are supposedly connected by a hyperlink, which does not work. Each requires the creation of a username and password, which unhelpfully are not the same. It is a Rube Goldberg Device, except the FCC product doesn't work, likely created by the only guy in my Computer Science 101 class at USC in 1983 who got a lower grade than I did.

So, no license, no trip. The leaves are beginning to fall. Maybe next year.

The VA website with which I've been interacting lately in my quest for government subsidized hearing aids is solidly okay, designed for the likelihood that the user is quite drunk and dropping cigarette ash all over the keyboard.

Why are so many institutional players so, so bad at creating a navigable website? With regard to the government, it's just like everything else they do--with no incentive for excellence, and no consequences for ineptitude, simply having a webpage is good enough. What, are you going to go do business with the other VA or FCC if the webpage is designed to confound?

Banks and the like are another story. They constantly ask me to rate their app or their webpage, which I decline to do because I don't want to sound like a curmudgeon complaining about things like getting dumped out of the page by using the back button to access the previous page. They all seem to do that; at least some have a warning in the sea of text and graphics about the mistake I'm about to make anyway.

But at least they try. They just don't succeed most of the time. I guess they see the website as something they are required to have to be competitive in 2024, but there's no margin in having a really good webpage because no one chooses their bank or their insurer on that basis.

Ramble enough. It's midmorning already. I wonder if I can get the Lexis AI robot to write this brief? A risky endeavor, given that I might accidentally lose her work product by hitting the back button.