Tmobile has at least four separate cron jobs that run at slightly different times of the morning that text you a thank you for paying your bill and do not check a database to see if they already did that. Each one of them is scar tissue from a broken process in a fractured dept.
It's really kind of amazing how many things are operated by cron jobs on fixed intervals and how visible the mold lines are if you know the grazing angle to view everything from
It often is as simple as "hey I already got that email ten minutes ago" hey babey you got cronned
most cron tasks are basically an admission that the boss demanded something be done Today and wouldn't let it wait for the dev team to actually add the code to the real OSS software where it belongs
Since all these tmo texts are insufferable PR crap you can see where this request came from. And now that it's "working" who's going to "waste" sprint credits on it?
The fact I get three identical messages means there's internal distrust and lack of communication. The billing manager, support manager and /another/ billing manager all demand this problem be Solved and none of them talked to each other
Two messages start with "t mobile message" and another starts with "free t mobile message" because nobody defined a process for making these consistent
Either the person tasked to make the third cron job didn't have any way of finding out what verbiage was used on existing ones, didn't know there were existing ones, or decided to "improve" the message format and their "improvement" wasn't back ported
i have two years of messages from tmo advertising a Napster product nobody wants. I'd be surprised if this promo is still going.
The napster ads come from a different short number than the billing notices. There are so many reasons this could have happened, from corporate infighting to permissions to simply not knowing how to figure out what number to use.
no matter how a company does its marketing, sooner or later someone will request a hardcoded advertisement like this that works differently from every single other ad they run. i expect this to run for years after the napster thing is shuttered.
i think about this a lot because i've seen it up close so much. there's always these cases where someone doesn't understand how the existing system for doing something works, so they'll make something from scratch. but
when it's like deep inside some program who really cares, right? but when it's exposed to the outside world, or in a UI anywhere, how do people not feel bad about the glaring mismatch in behavior they just created? my theory is incompetence
a tremendous number of managers are rich, in the same way that you'd call someone "white", as in they behave rich even if they aren't rich, so they have zero empathy and have never spent any time trying to understand others
Update: I have just received a fourth billing text from tmo, That's five texts total for a single account refill. The first two said "thank you for refilling", the third said "your account has been deactivated for lack of payment" and the fourth said "thank you for refilling"
All three "thank you" messages have different wording, so this is three separate scripts.
