So Bell redesigned their site, making it more 'user friendly.' Apparently you can now do all sorts of neat things like manage your accounts, wow. that's exciting.

Anyways, This months ExpressVu contained a questionable price increase of $3/month. As it turns out this 'fee' is given to older customers with old package plans. Great, since bell can't legally increase the prices of these old packages (thanks CRTC!) and they can't change the contents of these packages (thanks again!) they can however add this arbitrary fee for system access. This fee is apparently waived on all 'new' package customers.

So, my goal was to go to this URL that they included in the bill with some info on how to get rid of this so called fee.

Naturally I thought this was a good idea. I hopped in the browser-mobile (you know, the batmobile for the internet) and headed on over. Everything looked smooth, appeared to be functioning until randomly I'd get booted back out to the main page.

This was puzzling. I started again, being the persistant bastard I am. It failed again, and again. Never at the same spot, never giving the same error (when it actually did give me an error). It was puzzling.

Finally, I gave up and used IE. It worked.

This is technical. It has a lot to do with the insane complexity and bizzare use of sessions and cookies. I'm not about to debug the whole situation, though.

As a website developer in this day and age, I find this completely and utterly appalling. When I am paid to develop a website I don't take into consideration that "it must work in IE!" I have a strict rule (this site excluded) that it must work in any current browser (even though calling IE 6 'current' itself is questionable.)

Bell pays millions per year to have their website developed and maintained and to have it not work for someone using Mozilla Firefox (and likely other alternative browsers, such as Opera or Safari) is just rediculous.

It comes as no surprise to me really though. If you have a sympatico account you'll be well aware that Bell and Microsoft sleep together every other thursday night.

Seriously though, is it really in Bells best interest to ignore the 10 to 15% of people out there who just don't use windows and therefore can not use Internet Explorer? Sure it's only a small percentage and maybe I'm just an idiot for assuming that every user should be taken into consideration. Of course, I won't ignore the fact that this percentage is always increasing.

Here's hoping, for their sake, it's just a little 'bug' and it will function properly soon.

In the end though, the joke was on them. They raised the price by $3, I decreased the amount of packages by $16. I win.