I like doing stuff online… like cheating the queues by paying my bills via internet banking, which I’ve been using since the good ol’ days when HSBC issued the necessary MS-DOS software on a set of floppy disks…

The Maltese have a rather quirky way of handling their online services. There aren’t an awful lot that offer painless procedures. In order to access and pay your telephone bill online you have to apply in writing – and in person. Are they afraid that someone else will viciously pay my bill? When I paid a traffic ticket online once, the contravention reference number on the receipt had nothing to do whatsoever with any number on my ticket. Till this day I’m waiting for the delivery of a USB hub which I fancied ordering online from nextgen’s online shop a few years ago (they didn’t charge and I forgot all about it – must be they did too… LOL!).

So, experience has taught me to be very wary of anything online – if it’s made in Malta.

But against better judgement I decided to try out one more today, when I had one frustrating experience with the registration as an “individual taxpayer” on the Inland Revenue Department’s website, which was followed a while later by a sort of shock-horror moment that actually caused me to sweat when I paid our “underpaid income tax”.

So, while checking it all out I was happy to notice that it was now possible to register online (as opposed to going to one of the local council offices to do so): “The Inland Revenue is giving the opportunity to individual taxpayers that do not posess (sic) an e-ID to register for an IR Services On-line account.” Yippee! I clicked on ‘Register’ and filled in the form. Pretty straight forward stuff. Immediately upon clicking ‘Submit’ the said ‘Submit’ button greyed out and nothing else happened. No confirmation that everything’s fine, but no error message about something being amiss either. I checked for any e-mail that might have been received in response… nothing. I gave up for the time being, but not before at least once trying to log in – which unsurprisingly didn’t work without a login and password.

(In the meantime I’ve downloaded their “how to” guide in powerpoint format – whose size is 9 MB rather than the 5 MB stated on the website. It didn’t contain much new information, but at least I know now that there was supposed to be a “success” message as well as an e-mail informing me of the login and password details!)

Oh well. So I can’t fill in the tax return online… but hey, the payment was the really important task, which I went to tackle after lunch, feeling all refreshed and adventurous. What can I say, it turned out totally uncomplicated, and yes, painless. Until the final confirmation of payment screen, which shows the last four digits (or so I thought) of your credit card number. It was supposed to be 9633 but it read – and that’s where shock and horror set in – 6963; a few moments later I received the confirmation e-mail that contained the same mistake. I found it quite unbelievable but hey, who can say s/he’s infallible?

Subsequently I checked out the credit card account online – and the amount in question had, in fact, been paid. Since then I’ve discovered that the 12th digit of the card number is a 6, and the 16th digit is represented as an ‘*’ in the e-mail, which I had overlooked in my excitement… d’uh!!

So that part of the pain was my own making. But I can’t shake off the feeling that the programmer responsible for that was quite happy to do away with international conventions (at least I have only ever encountered first four or last four digits being displayed, but obviously I could be wrong like so often!!), just for the heck of it. The discovery was a true ONLY IN MALTA moment for me!

Update an hour later… I’m an extremely stubborn person – I don’t often give up on something after just one failure. And so I freshened up with a nice cuppa and went back to the ‘puter. You see, a small snippet of info had been stuck in the back of my mind, and all of a sudden I was able to grab it: when registering with Maltacom (or Go, how they call themselves now) they wouldn’t accept an e-mail that wasn’t with a local service provider… so I assumed – correctly, as it turned out – that this could have been the source of my troubles with the IRD ‘cos I had used my own website’s e-mail addy. So far so good. I even got the coveted “success” screen and the promise of an e-mail in my inbox!!The joy was short-lived though. Onvol’s mail server appears to be down, POP3 mail isn’t working and when I tried to access my account online I was told:

An unexpected error has occurred.
This may be due to resource unavailability or a technical issue.
The problem has been logged and the support team has been
notified via e-mail and SMS.
We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

Now I really, really can’t decide whether this is hilarious or outrageous… Healthier to laugh, though!
:lolsign:

Another hour has passed. Onvol mail server came back to life – and I’m almost choking with laughter. I know that by now you’re thinking this has been enough of a boring post for one day, but the response to my account activation is too good to be left out of this post:

Hilarious, definitely hilarious!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 5:34 pm and is filed under Sabine's Blog, The Geek Zone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.