Re: Best idea of the week, make that year. Yeah, yeah, I know the year just started

Subject: Re: Best idea of the week, make that year. Yeah, yeah, I know the year just started
From: Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net>
To: Chuck Martin <cm -at- writeforyou -dot- com>, TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2004 14:51:12 -0500

Chuck Martin wrote:




I don't see this as "brilliant" at all, but as another case of making the
docs do the garbage collection for bad design.

Here's the besic question: Why can't "Microangelo 5.5" be printed on the
chrage statement?

Answer: It can--if the system designers wanted to.

What makes you think so. This is a third-party biller ecommerce agent that handles transactions for many products from many companies. The credit card companies (and presumably one or more government agencies) require that the identification on the statement is that of the company that collected the money, not the company that manufactured the product.

If you bought a suit at a department store, would you want your credit card statement to say Nordstrom's or Hickey-Freeman?



Years and years and years (you get the picture) ago, in my very first
programming class (a BASIC class when I was a freshman in high school), some
of the first words out of my teacher's mouth were along the lines of
"Computers a dumb. They will do only and exactly and just what you tell them
to do."

So this system *could* be designed to print "Microangelo 5.5" on your charge
statement, but it wasn't. We could speculate on the many reasons why it
wasn't done this way, but the bottom line is that this eloquently worded and
informative email is nothing more than a Band Aid covering the wound of
another bad design.

Piffle!






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