The deterioration of IT

If the GPRN is the only number you are worried about on a gas bill then you're doing ok

That's more down to business analysts. Programmers will release any old shite if you let them.

Software design has gone to shyte over the years, a lot of it thanks to the likes of Microsoft.

Yeah I know I sing this tune regularly, but they were one of the prime movers in the way software was developed being the leading player in the industry.

There is no other industry where you sell a customer something and it is up to them to continously find the issues and try fix them.

And where it is expected it is going to have to be fixed the minute you start using it.

Imagine you buy a new car and it needs an engine change the minute you buy it.

Actually scrub that, the software on cars often has to be upgraded nowadays.

This development lifecycle has come across into other areas like vehicles, medical systems and of course the most glaringly biggest fookup of all, the 737 Max.

You can get away with poorly designed software in things like a PC or phone, but not in something that flies through the sky at 35,000 feet.

Fookups there don't end well.

Showing my age, but back in the early days software had to be well designed, well built when processing power, especially memory and disk space was a premium with sever limitations.

Now you can cobble together anything and who cares if it comes in a 4GB downloadable file (disk and DVD now long gone), needs to run 10 services, a dozen processes, takes 2GB memory to run and is riddled with memory leaks eating up even more memory once you do anything.

And don't get me started on modern fooking websites.

You go onto likes of Vodafone to be greeted with big pictures of a someone holding a phone up to their ear, or right now a kid and parent looking at a computer screen.

We all fooking know what a phone looks like and how to use the fooking thing without being shown a fooking picture.

We almost all fooking know what a laptop looks like and how you view one.

To get to relevant links you have to scroll for pages full of large images offering nothing, of course except pictures that pander to the obligatory box ticking inclusivity mullarkey where almost every pic has to have equal makeup of men/women, black/white/yellow/red, disabled, etc, etc.

Funnily enough they never have fat, old, balding types.

EDIT: three.ie is even worse now.

It is even more of a joke when you view things like equipment for service or engineering industry to be greeted with images of gorgeous spotlessly clean clothed women using the equipment in a work environment.

And yes I know a lot of that may be down to morons who call themselves marketing executives.

Yeah I know websites are built to be cross platform, but they often stink and end up looking like Fisher Price built them.

Ok rant over, now back to trying to get yet another piece of god forsaken software to run again.

What it does is great a complete unnecessary support process loop, and you treat users like mushrooms.

Its creating work (especially for IT) when the objective should be to eliminate it.

That might be the bill

The bill amount

10,000,000

I am talking about a GPRN (gas), I haven't seen one with 8 digits before (in dealing with several relatives accounts).

Alun has confirmed a seven digit GPRN with one leading zero. Still not eight. It all highlights a lack of standardisation causing unnecessary confusion for the consumer. It is probably more in the remit of the CRU to clarify and specify technical and billing requirements (god help us)🙄

7 digits with a 0 in front of it is 8 digits.

I'm guessing, they used a number field instead of text. Then didn't validate it (or test it) or do sanity checks on the database.

Wha?

Or maybe

Maybe Ray had a calculator, the old ones even look like PCs

It shouldn't be a testers job to make decisions about how an icon looks. If an inconsistent icon is what the BAs want, that's what they get.