Adventures in Customer DisService

Spent most of today beating my head against a wall over bad user interfaces online.

Allegheny County Real Estate - their database on properties, assessments and taxes is very good and easy to figure out. But if you want to actually talk to anyone, you're screwed. Went to different phone numbers, and the first real estate number I reached said that the person hadn't been in since April 5 and no you could not leave a message. Really helpful. On a fairly random page, I found the phone number that should've pointed me in the right direction. But no one answered and there was no way to leave a message.

Yes, I know that agencies/companies really don't want to talk to customers. And this would be OK if they had a lot of useful information online that was searchable. These days, they just add "AI" to the end of a search as if they were really using Artificial Intelligence. The two "AIs" I've used recently (Meta AI on Facebook and the one on Ancestry.com that writes your life story based on genealogical facts a few weeks ago) were worse than the existing search and, Meta AI chats endlessly to you. AncestryAI can't figure out the difference between facts and errors. At least you can turn Meta AI off if you want and AncestryAI is optional.

So on the Real Estate questions I had, I had to open an account in order to send them a question. Also documented the many problems I had just getting that far. [[A month later - I still haven't heard back from them.]]

Next issue - my bank. Again, no real search online, but also no claim that AI was available. Found a number labelled CONTACT, used it...and, within a minute, had suspended access to my account because it said I gave them the wrong info. Tried again but pressed 0 right away. Got a nice guy and we chatted about my frustration. It turned out there was another page of phone numbers beyond the CONTACT Robot (and it sounded like he was getting a lot of complaints about that). But he answered my question and removed my suspension from my account. Two problems solved reasonably quickly!

I've used Quicken for nearly 35 years, mostly because I hated mailing out checks and wanted a record of where our money went. It's pretty easy to attach banks and other financial institutions to Quicken...except for the company that holds Jim's 401k. I went to their Website and found info about attaching the 401k account to Quicken. But following their instructions did not work. I called one person and made the mistake of calling the account an IRA account. That took me around in circles for a while with a guy who insisted they knew nothing about Quicken. Tried again and got a person attached to 401ks. He, too, knew nothing about Quicken. I was extremely unhappy and sad I could not hang up on him as definitely as we could back in the old phone days. For this one account only, I have to manually update the amount in the 401k in Quicken every few weeks.

Yes, first world problems. But computers and the online world have been available for over nearly 40 years now. Why can't online customer service improve????

Why Can't Death Certificates Be "Partially Completed" Before We Die?

 I was reading Shaina Feinberg & Julia Rothman's excellent New York Times article "I Asked My Mom if She Was Prepared to Die."  It had a lot of practical information on "getting ready for death," like making sure your financial accounts have other signatories, and reminding the survivors to order more death certificates than they think they'll need.  Yes, you will need more than 10, trust me.

 Which made me wonder - why can't we complete our death certificates with all that family information in advance?  Granted, we don't know when or how we'll die, but most of us know our family information better than our significant other might.

A few years ago, after our father died, my brother completed the death certificate.  Except...he listed the wrong state for where our grandmother was born.  This error, though minor, will drive future genealogists nuts.  I actually added a note to my Ancestry.com record for our father saying that his death certificate had this error.

Many decades ago, after my husband's grandfather died, his grandmother listed the wrong country for his birth.  He was born in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, she listed his country of birth as Germany, since he came over speaking German when he was a boy.  I added the same note to my grand-father-in-law's Ancestry record - wrong country on death certificate.

The notion of filling out a death certificate in advance may seem macabre but we all will need one some day. Collecting this information, which is later certified by a doctor or funeral home after death with information around a death, should be reasonably trivial due to the World Wide Web.  Each state can set up the appropriate online death certificate online. I believe every state has a different death certificate format. Each person could set up a death certificate account for the state in which they live, fill it out with the accurate info while they're alive, and tell their next-of-kin that they have such an account and how to access it.

And even if this information can't be immediately imported into an actual death certificate, when the doctor/funeral home goes to complete it, they could have all the accurate information for that person readily available. 

I tried to find out what a current state of Pennsylvania death certificate looks like.  I could not find one at the Pennsylvania records Web site.  I've seen recent Florida and Massachusetts death certificates, and many old death certificates as part of doing genealogical research. I understand the reluctance to not display an entire current death certificate online (fraud) but why not display the portions that could be completed before death?

Let's use the Web for some useful record-keeping for survivors' families by letting people partially complete the "life" part of their death certificate while they're still with us.  It'll save their next-of-kin hassle when they have to complete someone else's death certificate.