Thursday, April 07, 2016

The Blamer Games

Sometime last year I switched from Republic Bank to Pioneer National Bank.  I could not access Republic Bank from my cell phone using cellular data.  I could access my account if I went to a coffee shop and used wi-fi.

Republic Bank and Consumer Cellular (my cellular) provider each absolved themselves of any problem.  Republic Bank said that Consumer Cellular was changing its IP address.  Consumer Cellular said they were not.

I could access my wife’s accounts at Pioneer National Bank without a problem.  So, I switched my account to Pioneer also.

Now this problem has raised its ugly head again.  I tried making a estimated tax payment to the State of Minnesota.  It would not open any page where I was to provide information, whether I wanted to pay online or just request a form to pay by mail.  It said I had cookies turned off.  This happened with both FireFox and Safari.  With Safari it happened both with my MacBook Air and with my iPhone.

As far as I could see, in both FireFox and Safari I did not have cookies turned off.  In fact, in one of these browsers I had a long list of cookies.

I went to Perk Place and bingo, everything worked.  Same laptop.  I have a receipt in my email.

Wanna bet that somebody will blame the problem on my Mac.  As I gaze around the coffee shop, I see over a dozen Mac laptops and only on or two other laptops.  I think these providers better get with the program.

I have heard this same thing from the Duluth News Tribune, a problem with Macs.  I can’t even access the Olive edition of the DNT.  Olive is the name of the software that provides a facsimile of the printed edition and allows expanding any article for easier reading.  However, I access the Olive edition of the Star Tribune without problem.  In fact, the Strib has even fixed the annoying problem of inconsistent expansion of the comics.

This whole mess would be comical if it weren’t so time-consuming and frustrating.