Tech Support Blues

There’s this issue that had us stumped for quite some time. Our chairman had been complaining that he could never access his online bank account. He always gets an “under maintenance” notice. But whenever we go to his computer and access it, it was perfectly okay. Anyway, on the umpteenth time that he asked for help, I finally decided to watch how he accesses the site. It turns out that he use Google Mail as his home page and whenever he goes to any other site, he inputs the URL on the Google search field instead of the browser address bar. This does make sense from an ease-of-use point of view. But unfortunately, Google returns a link that turned out to be obsolete. When you click on it, you almost wouldn’t know it is obsolete because the page displays the exact same “under maintenance” notice as when it is really under maintenance. We really shouldn’t take for granted the actions users make.