Seth’s experience of trying to talk to someone about his broken Kettle has got NOTHING to trying to talk to Rogers.

• While surfing, I get a message saying that I am near my bandwidth limit for the month. I don’t know when my billing date is, so I’m not sure how bad this is. Clicking on the “monitor your bandwidth” link brings me to a login page.

• I have a Rogers book with my account info, but I can’t work out the username and password for this page.
• I read through the book for clues. There is information about logging in to the rogers.yahoo.com site and information about how to check your account once there.
• I know that information, so I log in.
• I find a billing section but have trouble finding usage info.
• Help centre search returns lots of results none of which have to do with my question.
• On the billing page, I find a link to monitor my bandwidth.
• Clicking on it brings me to a new login page.
• I enter the username and password that worked before. It does not work here. They want a different username and password. I still have no idea what this is.
• Luckily, they give me a 1 877 number to call for assistance. I call it.
• A recording tells me that THE NUMBER I AM CALLING IS GOING TO BE DISCONTINUED. Then it repeats the message in French. Then it transfers me to the right number.
• I have to go through the voice recognition menu (pro tip – speak gibberish until it gives up and gives you a human).
• The human tells me my billing date, so I’ll know when the usage limit resets.

Why, oh why couldn’t the process have been

• While surfing I get a message saying that I am near my bandwidth limit for the month and it will reset on [BILLING DATE GOES HERE]?

Every step of the way was clearly designed by people with institutional needs in mind instead of customer experience.

• Why can’t I actually look at my billing through the roger.yahoo.com account info page?

• Why do I need to create a new login and password to view my rogers information?
• Why didn’t my account book COME with a login and password (at least Bell gets this much right).
• Why does their web page send you to a soon-to-be-discontinued phone number?
• Why doesn’t the old 1-877 number just silently route you to their new phone system? How much can it possibly cost to maintain more than one points of entry?

I’m sure there are reasonable answers to each of these questions, having to do with how the architecture of the user authentication systems relate to various protocols. I don’t care. All I know is that I spent 20 minutes trying to find a very simple answer to a very simple question.

(I will say that the actual dude I talked to was very helpful and quick with the answers. So top marks for hiring him. But he’s only a part of the service. I hate how long it took me to get to him.)