The Luddite side of me

This might make me sound like an old fogey, but doing things the electronic way is only good if that way happens to be more efficient. Not so the AA, which I see has switched to notifying me about my membership renewal via email.
   Here’s what I told them tonight after spending 20 minutes doing it this newfangled way.

Hello there:

I see the AA has sent me an email reminder to renew my membership. Please can you switch back to sending these by post? The electronic experience was terrible.
   1. I never saw the email. It was only checking through the spam folder that I saw it had arrived on the 10th. That was only by chance.
   2. While renewing was simple, the renewal notice that comes electronically does not become a tax invoice when paid—unlike the posted notice.
   3. To get the invoice, I had to go online into the MyAA system.
   4. To get into the MyAA system, I had to sign up again, because my username had expired.
   5. I signed up again but couldn’t have my username because it was taken. No kidding: it was taken by me. Frustrating.
   6. The site isn’t that easy to navigate, sorry. Took ages to find the invoice (‘receipt’). To my surprise, all my old receipts are there, too—so what’s all this about my account having expired? Come to think of it, if it had expired, you’d never have been able to send me any emails over the last few years.
   7. I have to do my own printing, which I’m betting is less eco-friendly than offset printing.
   The old way: the notice would arrive, I would send back a cheque or renew online, bingo.
   If I wasn’t looking through the hundreds of emails in my spam folder—something I do not do regularly—I would never have seen your notice and I would have failed to renew my membership.
   There’s a lot of merit to the old ways, and if it’s not a burden, please continue sending the notices to me via the post—that way [they]’ll arrive.

Kind regards,

Jack

   The expired account BS is something I really tire of. Nvidia did that to me not too long ago, forcing me to sign up again and then saying my own username was taken—despite also saying that I needed to update my drivers. Therefore, (6) above is a very pertinent point, and applies to both organizations. There’s a remarkable lack of logic in claiming an account has expired when you are using the very data from that account to reach that person.
   I find it baffling that companies will lose user data—the Telegraph newspaper springs to mind, as I had signed up there in the 1990s—which makes you wonder just how secure they are.
   At least in the US, the NSA kindly keeps a copy for you …
   It’s not unlike banks telling us that cheques take five to seven days to clear. In 1976, this process was overnight. But if you work for a bank, maybe your computers do work seven times more slowly than the advanced machines Databank had 40 years ago … Sorry, bankers, pull the other one. Some of us actually have functioning memories.


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