The delights of a not-quite self-healing network

Look at this rubbish:

I’m trying to pay my sodding T-Mobile bill.

I’ve been trying to pay it for the last 5 minutes.

The LAST thing I want to do is phone up and read off numbers on a credit card. That, to me, seems highly, highly ridiculous in this age of connectivity.

Or apparent connectivity.

The first time I tried to pay, the page timed out because the statse.webtrendslive.com server wasn’t responding. So they can’t manage high availability.

And neither, it seems, can the people behind cap.securecode.com. Whoever they are. This is a system that pops up whenever you’re processing a UK-credit/debit card transaction to further verify your identity.

Which is great when it works.

But when it doesn’t, I’m left looking and feeling highly stupid for trying to pay.

And T-Mobile are feeling my private wrath. Because they’re the brand in front of the screen right now.

Have we, in this marketplace filled with high availability clusters, cloud-managed virtual self-healing networking capacity, still not got things working?

On the 8th time, it actually all worked. I verified myself with the securecode system.

Aaaaaaand then the transaction completed, handing me back to T-Mobile who promptly failed the payment on instructions from my card issuer.

Why?

Because I’d tried the transaction 7 times too many, unbeknownst to me.

Total bollocks.

Five-nines. My arse.