Dreamwidth's place for all heathens

State Farm has a garbage-quality autopayment system.

Six months ago, they failed to process my autopayment. I'd had to change credit card numbers to contest an unauthorized charge, from a company I'd never heard of, possibly "partner" to some other company I do business with, acting on their behalf. The credit card company declared the transactions to be legitimate, without any explanation to me, and left me with a change of account number to clean up afterwards.

Getting back to State Farm. I hadn't updated that auto-pay, so it tried to use the old card, and failed. I got an email, telling me to deal with it myself, but not immediately, as the bill wouldn't be payable online for 1-3 business days. Since the autopay was scheduled for the renewal date, I'd presumably be uninsured until they allowed me to pay it. Or I could call my agent, who, they claimed, would be able to help me.

I waited out the slow batch update delay, added the new number as a new payment method (the old one couldn't be updated in place), made it my preferred payment method, and [paid the bill. Their UI either offered no way to update the auto-payment, or implied that my new preferred method would be used.

There may have been some other interactions. These are what I remember, supplemented by State Farm's report of my payment history, as seen on their website today.

This morning, I received a similar notice that my autopayment had failed, and manual payment would not work for 1-3 days. They'd used the older, non-preferred payment method.

I may now have successfully set it to use the right card, but of course they won't do that automatically until the next bill, 6 months from now.

I've put an "appointment" in my calendar to check their website again in 3 days, when they will hopefully allow me to pay this bill online.

If I'm really lucky, this update of my autopayment method won't be conveniently "lost", leaving me to handle the same nuisance 6 months from now.

Fuck you, State Farm. May your CIO (presumably in charge of web programming) and CEO both die slowly and painfully from an incurable disease. Or since that's perhaps a bit excessive, may they both find themselves stuck with service providers just like them,and wind up spending 22 hours a day deleting unwanted emails, fixing problems that never should have happened, returning unordered merchandise, and discovering when they try to use it that their insurance doesn't cover what they thought it did. And may their afterlife, if any, involve all the same things, except perhaps more so, in the manner of Dante's Inferno's handling of sellers of fraudulent medicines.

p.s. To be fair, State Farm has not pulled the "nope, this isn't covered" thing on me, and I did "total" an elderly car insured with them a few years ago. Their claims people were in fact polite, efficient, and informative. It's their web site and their billing I'm angry about.

My taxes are done.

The capital gain part was unpleasant, and the beta import function made numerous errors, leading to me retyping much of the information. (Its issues were a mix of copying some but not all of the relevant lines, and mistaking subtotal lines for additional transactions. It made these errors on statements from two different brokerages - the only ones where I had capital gains details.)

There's some possibility of additional errors, without the scaffolding I'm used to, but both the feds and the state have accepted my forms. The overall numbers are reasonable, any glitches would be in the details.

Money to pay my taxes due will be taken from my chequing account on April 15, by which time the money I transferred to cover this will have arrived.

Total aggravation: less than I usually experience from Turbotax.

Total $ cost: notably less than with Turbotax.

I won't be using Turbotax again.

In more surprising news, the Big Ugly Bill increased my deductions, and thus reduced the amount of tax owing. That doesn't change my political opinions about whether the bill was good for the country in the longer term, but it does give me a conflict of interest.

I'm also amused, in a sick kind of way, to not remember reading anything about the extra $6 K deduction for older people (my age), reduced if their incomes are above a threshold (mine was), but in my case at least not reduced all the way to zero. I suspect my news sources of not wanting to mention anything good about the bill, but I may simply have ignored it on the assumption that my income would be too high to benefit.

This section is for nuisances, small aggravations, learning curve,and problems that are probably fixable, but not yet fixed. Compared to the other two posts, it's all small stuff. But many a mickle makes a muckle - and there's a lot in this category.

I'm posting it a bit late, and may have forgotten some of the things I intended to include two weeks ago.

1. Canonical has (a) decided to use snaps for key components of their linux distribution (Ubuntu, Kubuntu etc.). As the developer of the snap packaging system it's also decided to make snaps forcibly update themselves. Firefox arrives as a snap, and has new versions approximately every two weeks.
   
   This blew up on me a week and a half ago. I posted https://arlie.dreamwidth.org/532599.html at that time, so I'll omit farther detail here.
   
   
2. Mozilla has gone all in on Chatbot support. This is quite controversial among Firefox users, some of whom have flamed Mozilla up down and sideways on their forums.
   
   I'm rather disgusted myself. I encounter enough human-written lies, damn lies, and confabulations; I don't need an extra serving of confabulations ("hallucinations") from my web browser.
   
   Checking out alternative web browsers is on my backburner, but I don't expect to find anything substantially better. Chromium has Google cooties all over it, giving me a serious feeling of caveat emptor.
   
   ( Read more... )

The following is a lightly edited stream of events report of attempting to use FreeTaxUSA:

1. Account successfully created on the Mac, using Safari. Used a throw-away email ID in case of persistent spam.
   
   
2. It was able to analyze the pdf produced by Turbotax containing my 2024 tax forms, and import that information sensibly. No errors found (yet).
   
   
3. After some days, and at least one Safari crash, their Safari window had disappeared. Attempted to relogin on linux, using Firefox.
   
   Their login had a pop-up on both the user id and password boxes, covering the popup from ProtonPass which would have given me my login details. Looked those up by starting to login on Safari. Once I typed my somewhat obfuscated user ID on Firefox, the unhelpful pop-up went away, and I was able to click to get Proton Pass to supply the password.
   
   I think the pop-up provider here was FreeTaxUSA, not Firefox, but I'm not absolutely certain.
   
   On the good side, they were willing to let me see my password, unlike many sites that "know" their web page is used only in public places, complete with dodgy shoulder surfers.
   
   ( Read more... )