O2, silly games & the worst web site of 2009 / Mistakes

Very infrequently I top-up my Pay-as-you-go mobile phone. The weekend was one such occasion. O2 have a promotion going on involving those old fair ground duck in a pool with prizes on the bottom. Its called the O2 “hook a duck” campaign. The prizes you get are time limited, so although I have received something, it is unlikely that I will get to use it. For me it turned out to be a waste of time. Advertisements and sales campaigns often do, unless you can ensure value is delivered to your customers.

To put me through that after the trauma of the website was too much.

To top-up I logged on to the site and followed the links, a page was returned - all text in a column down the left hand side. The fields to enter your data were there, and the anti-virus / web protection system (AVG) didn't complain. I restarted my browser (Firefox 3.0.0.7) - same. Eventually I got through the process, on the third attempt, and received my text message to say that I'm topped-up.
I must say that compared to the other networks that the rest of the family are on (Orange mainly) O2 are usually OK. This was very poor, so because I can find a way to tell the company, I'll tell the world.

It was probably just someones mistake, but it should not have been allowed to get like that, it should have been checked by others.

Just every so often, and thankfully quite infrequently, I commit the most simple basic mistake. The boys would say "school boy error", but that would be unkind to school boys. Today it was one of those occasions. I pasted the code into the window, and clicked the button. Instead of creating a new table in the Database on my workstation, I deleted the table from the production system and re-created it. Why was I not as paranoid as usual about doing just this sort of thing? Who can say? I'm human, so I need forgiveness. At least the eternal version is available, even if it will not be forthcoming from my colleagues quite so quickly. Worst of all, I cannot fix it - I do not yet know enough about the system to do that.