Question: if you make one bid on an item and win it, AND you get three confirmation emails that you have won the bid (all with the same ID number) would you assume a) that you REALLY won the bid and you should pay for one item, or b) that you actually bought three items. Whoops, wrong answer.

Yes the extra emails were a computer glitch, but I'm getting banned for life on ebay anyway. Why? Simple: Ebay's new policy of not getting any mail from customers for even the most legitimate reasons. The policy is evident in their help file, it points to customer communities as well as itself, but does not offer any contact to customer support. In fact, parent links are still there to contact customer support, but they send you around in circles without giving you the contact, or they actually do a file not found. 

This is one of those cases where a money-losing part of your operation (tech support) actually keeps you from losing money faster (less business due to customers being banned for life). It seems so easy to cut tech support because it costs money. And sometimes these cuts are the right decision. But in this case, it's short term and potentially fatal thinking for a company. 

comment []11:51:45 PM    

As a developer, do you ever get so busy in your task that you mistrust your "ordinary person" instincts? This happened to me. I was building a site for someone and thought a bunch of data had been lost. I realized the data was there, I just had to hit "next" to see the rest of it. No problem. I hit next and found the data, then moved on to finishing the site. This all happened in a split second, so fast I was unaware I was thinking like an "ordinary person."

The next day one of the users of the site has the same problem and wrote me about it. It was only then that I remembered my earlier confusion. I love process as much as the next person, but it has trained me to override common-sense critique at the point of development. Sometimes this is a good thing, but in this case it wasn't. That in itself is an interesting point, (a la Rapid Development) but the real meat I'm getting to is: A theoretical idea of "what's right" ( = discrete processes for development and critique) has infringed on my actual thoughts and opinions. And it did this quickly, like a subliminal add shown between your TV's v-blanks.

This kind of common-sense override happens when you're in learning mode. You bring an inherent mistrust of things you know already, in order to favor new information du jour. Three years ago I was in know-everything mode, and you couldn't convince me I was wrong with any amount of facts or begging. (Well, also because I wasn't wrong in the first place, but that's beside the point). Astounding how software development brings out these subtleties of human nature. Isn't this supposed to be a dry and mathematical field of work?

comment []3:26:57 PM