The Home of Tom & Morven

I got an SMS today from Optus - an advertisement text message about a new service where if you specify 5 phone numbers you call regularly you get extra credit each month. Thinking this is perhaps actually worth my time setting up, I go to the Optus website and try to register an account.

In the login screen, I get to the password stage, so I randomly generate a 150bit password using software I use to translate mouse and key input into a randomly generated password. It took a minute for me to realise that the maximum alphanumerals it can contain is 20. Then it took me another minute to realise that it can only be between 3 and 20 alphanumerals. So I try one 19 long which is now only 105bit cipher strength instead of 150bit. Geez who are these people dictating what the maximum cipher strength we’re allowed to have in our accounts. It’s not like a few extra digits here or there on their servers is going to overload their server!

Anyway, five minutes later, and using a password as simple as testpassword123 didn’t work. I then tried using Internet Explorer, and it still didn’t work. Determined, I went back to Mozilla Firefox, and about ten minutes later, I found a password that worked! The password was (don’t be concerned I’ve already changed it) Optusisshit01. No kidding, it’s the only password I could get that worked!

Happy with this (albeit 60bit cipher strength) password, I logged into the Optus Web Account and discovered I then had to “link an account” to this web account, even though the web account required my phone number as part of allowing me to setup a web account. Go figure.

Anyway, so I click on the Link Account option, and get this:

Deciding I should probably change my original password considering I’m publishing what it was on the internet, I go to change my password. This time, they are more flexible with the password options, and don’t specify the maximum length it needs to be. They also specify you can use other characters too! How nice. However, the proof is in the pudding:

Another five minutes later, I eventually find another password that works. FYI adding an extra numeral to the end of the original didn’t work, nor to the start of it! It seems you have to actually use passwords that undermine Optus in order for the password to work. As funny as it is, I won’t tell you what this second password is because then I’ll have to try to change it again, and I’m running low on patience as it is Thinking now that I don’t want to be disappointed and find out later that my password isn’t really working even though I’m logged in at the moment, I thought it would be a good idea to logout and login again, just to check I can use this password more than once. Upon clicking on login after logging out, I get this:

This is the first time a website has demanded that I restart my web browser apart from after installing more software, a plugin/extension, or a codec of some description. Now I just give up. Optus can take their Optus Turbo MyTime, and ***** it up their ****, because this is MY time you’re wasting.

I’m allowed to say this, right!?!?

Eventually though, I managed to get to the linking of account screen by clicking on the other link. It seems the first was just a red herring to keep you on your toes.

So in the screen that I get to, which I thought was for linking a mobile phone account to my mobile phone web account, I come across yet another road block:

I’ll admit that it’s possible I’ve been distracted by the fact that I’m blogging about how bad the optus website is, and it’s possible I may have mis-read critical information which resulted in me ending up in the broadband internet side of Optus. Which reminds me, I should also blog about why not to use Optus or Telstra as your ISP (Internet Service Provider) - I have so many bad stories about people getting screwed over by those two companies. Anyway, back to the topic on hand. I think I got to this point on the website not just because I’m distracted by blogging. I think it’s partly to do with the stupid amounts of bright colours and annoying flash animations that are going on. Speaking of which, I couldn’t even load the website at work (note to SWK/ABR: it was on unpaid time, after work hours, whilst I had a few minutes to kill before heading off to a training seminar) to work because if you don’t have flash installed, you just can’t load the website AT ALL.

So now I go back to the original text message I got from Optus, scroll further down on my phone, and find that you have to ring a phone number to setup the new benefits of Optus MyTime. You are greeted by a machine which gives a 5 minute spill about the new benefits and the new contract. It then tells you to press ‘1′ to switch to the new contract. But hang on a second, I don’t recall “off the top of my head” what call rates I’m paying, so I suspect this new MyTime is really just a trick for them to get out of their original contract. This is where I cut my losses and go to bed, it’s just too difficult. I have no information from Optus that directly compares the deal that I currently have, with this new deal they are offering. It’s like someone offering me a much more tastier pizza, but then after I’ve already accepted, I find out it’s a much smaller pizza.

If you enjoyed reading this and want to hear about my recent experience with Telstra putting “Telstra Home Messaging” on our home phone (without us knowing) and then not being able to turn it off once we realised, and then refusing to accept there is a fault in the system which wouldn’t allow us to turn it off ourselves, and then getting angry at me when I tried to convince them that I shouldn’t have to call up more than ten times.