A mad day on the internet. Comments please

Does the internet annoy you sometimes?

Four times yesterday, I was very frustrated when trying to carry out some tasks on the internet.

Firstly, I had to do something online at Companies House. This involved paying them a £15 fee.

I fill out all the forms and passwords, so far so good then when coming to pay, their payment gateway reported an error. So I had to do it all again. Then a message came up saying payment was fine and all was ok.

This morning I receive an email from Companies House saying there was a problem with my submission and they didn't get payment. Even though their payment provider said it was ok.

So now I have to get on the good old telephone and sort out the mess.

Secondly, I decided to set up online access for one of my business credit cards so I can my spend throughout the month.

Once again after filling out all sorts of forms and passwords I hit enter and a database error pops up. I contact my bank by telephone and they can't understand why I can't set up access.

Eventually, some bright guy manually resets my password at their end, I resubmit all my data online and voila I am set up ok.

Just took over an hour to do something that should have taken 5 minutes.

Thirdly, I tried to pay for two tickets to go to an event. First time I tried it comes up with an error once again with a different payment gateway, I think it was worldpay this time. Message says that I need to start again.

I start again and this time success.

Later that day I get an automated email saying thank you for ordering four tickets.

Crap! I only wanted two.

So did the money go through twice or not?

So, I had a bright idea of logging on to my online card facility that I had just set up to see if my payment had been taken twice.

Sadly, it takes the bank 3 days to process the information and then make it available online to me :-(

So back to the telephone...

Lastly, I am in the middle of a house search and thought I had spotted something nice. I go to the website of the Estate Agent and try to find it. I found the listing for it quite quickly and so I click on the link for more details and yes you have guessed it up pops a database error saying the database is corrupted somehow and can't display any information.

I tried a few more times and same thing. I had just about had enough today and so went to sleep!

I guess this was one of those days.

Now, I love the internet and the changes it has made to day to day living and the easy access to information, but some days it really drives me mad and I yearn for the good old days when there seemed to be less day to day hassle.

All of these sites were large and weren't mom and pop kitchen table setups. So there should be no excuse really.

This then made me question just how much business I and everyone else may be missing out on because of failings in technology or wrongly set up websites, scripts, poor usability or whatever.

At the end of the day, this all goes to show that the internet is still in its Wild West days and all the technology hasn't been nailed down yet. Or implemented properly for that matter.

This also shows me that there are still opportunities around.

One of the most frequent comments I get from customers is just how user friendly some of my sites are. They are not perfect, far from it, but if you can just keep things simple and make things easy for website visitors then surely this definitely helps in achieving the overall goal.

Does anyone else ever get these kinds of days?

Is there anything else we can learn from these types of situations?