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Bad design? Or pregnancy brain?
We get some of our bill by e-bill. They e-mail, I go to the site, log in, see what I owe, and pay on my online banking. Easy peasy.
Or so I thought. I just noticed that for one of our bills, we have a credit (and have had for a while), but it hasn't been clearly stated as credit, it just shows up as Amount Owed ($$$$), so I take what's in the brackets and pay it, which essentially doubles our credit with them. Apparantly in online land brackets = credit (hi bad design)
I must have done it at least 2-3 times in the past little while without noticing, and I now have an $800 credit with this vendor!!!
I feel so ridiculous for doing this. So I'm trying to off the blame from myself and chalk it up to either a. pregnancy brain, or b. bad site design. I'm thinking bad site design...
Oh well now that I've finally noticed I guess I won't have to pay this bill for a long time while I use up the credit!
Anyone else have an equally lame embarrassing story to share?
Re: Bad design? Or pregnancy brain?
Sorry, I say pregnancy brain. I'm pretty sure that brackets often mean credit, not just on online bank land. Anyway, even if it was bad design, the pregnancy brain caused you to forget that you had paid this bill a few times recently!
It happens
I was so forgetful when I was pregnant. It was pathetic.
That's what I would do....
Is it at least a company that you use frequently so you can use up that credit quickly?
I have always known brackets to mean credit in the paper and online world. The bills on epost are exactly the same as the paper versions (for the bills that we have on there at least).
My even MORE embarassing story: instead of paying my PC Mastercard online, I paid ROGERS. Except, we had just taken a trip, so I paid Rogers $4,600.
It actually got cleared up within a week - I was pretty happy about how quickly it got corrected.
p.s. it's probably bad design!!! I know I made the above mistake twice when I was banking with PC Financial, their bill payments drop down list is not user friendly (in my opinion).
However I am sure industrial engineers, systems design engineers, etc are more likely to blame the design than themselves *wink wink*
Yes, maybe brackets mean credit, but how hard would it be to reformat the template to say CREDIT beside it? Not hard at all - but then they wouldn't have your $800 (and lots of other credits) sitting in their accounts gaining interest for them.
There are lots of small solutions that make things like paying bills more customer friendly, but none that are equally as profitable.
It says Amount Owing: ($XXX.XX)
If you click on the actual e-bill (which I never did, because it said the amt owing on the main page), then it says the amount again with CR beside it, which is how I figured out it was a credit. So it is written, you just have to drill down to get it.
It's obviously my own fault, I'm not sure why I thought it was reasonable to have a $400 gas bill in July, but instead of looking in to it I just paid it.
The actual bill was less than $50, which means it'll take like 16 months to use up the credit at this rate...
I guess I'll contact them to ask about getting a refund. Man I feel so lame.
Am still blaming it on bad e-bill design! I am positive I'm not the only one who's made the mistake...