Hansenet is a local telecommunication company. To most people in Germany, the company will be better known as Alice, which is a trademark of Hansenet. I’ve written about them before.
Although I’ve been a happy customer ever since we switched many years ago, I had a few problems in the last few days. The reason for those problems was, that I wanted to port my mobile phone number to their new mobile service, which they provide in cooperation with o2, the mobile branch of their parent company Telefonica.
You need to port the number using the customer menu on their website. The problem is, that their menu (not the website, only the menu) does not scale so well. Whatever it is, it’s almost impossible to reach it during the day. It’s always down or very slow. No problem, I’m often working at night, so I just tried to log in at around 2 a.m. today. Unfortunately, my internet service was down. This is very rare, it happens about once every two years for a few hours, but it fits in nicely with the rest of the story ;).
By 5 a.m. internet service was back, Hansenet gave me an IP address again. So I logged in into the (still) responsive customer menu (which they channel via the AOL portal, that seems a bit odd). I found the right form to fill out. But half way into the form, I was unable to fill in some text fields. What the heck? Seems to be an issue with Firefox 3b3 on Linux. It didn’t work with Firefox 2 all the same, so it was a Firefox issue, not a 3beta3 issue. Had it not been that important, I had phoned them right away and told them. But this was a bit urgent, so I fired up my Windows virtual machine and started Internet Explorer. This worked, as I was able to fill out the form. Interestingly, a few option buttons were misaligned. I guess their form CSS is optimized for standards, so Internet Explorer has difficulties, but their java script (which is required) is optimized for Internet Explorer and they didn’t test the form in Firefox. This cost me an additional 20 minutes just to fill out the form so I am a bit pissed now. First the downtime of the menu, then the downtime of my internet service and now I even had to deal with Windows. And I hate Windows… but that’s a different story.
Shameless plug: If this post was useful to you, please consider buying yourself something from one of my Amazon stores: US store, UK store, FR store, DE store, CA store. If you're not into Amazon, why not donate something to GNOME, Mozilla or Wikipedia? Thank you!
