another day, another reason to be irritated with intuit.
i’ve documented my beefs with intuit, the makers of quicken and, i now remember, turbo tax, all over this site. here and here and here and here, to be specific. but i just must beat this dead horse one more time.
today i filed my income tax using turbo tax online, the fine fine intuit product. which, i must admit, is easy to use and well-designed. my company now provides electronic w-2 forms, which can be imported into turbo tax online. so i didn’t have to retype my w-2 numbers, and you can now choose which questions to step through instead of being forced to answer every question about whether you purchased farm equipment this year and such, so the process was even more quick and painless and comprehensive than it was before.
but of course, it being intuit, all could not go smoothly. there’s a link for fidelity customers, of which i am one, to follow to the turbo tax online site and, if you follow it, you get 50% off the filing fees.
so i followed the link. and i stepped through the series of pages filing my return, each of which had an enormously long url in the address bar that contained “fidelitydisc=” or something like that, so i assumed that i was going to get my discount.
which of course, after finishing and filing my electronic return, i did not. i was going to just let it go, but after i spent time straightening out my cingular wireless phone bill to the tune of $80 or so, kirk guilted me into getting my $20 back from intuit.
fine.
so step one i went to the turbo tax website to initiate an online chat session with their help desk. after trying in safari, firefox and even explorer, i finally figured out that their chat client is apparently not mac compatible.
aaargh and grrrr. but fine. i’ll call the number.
no hold time, which is good on a saturday afternoon. no hold time because, naturally, their call center is in india.
now i am as liberal as they come. and living in new york, you can hardly afford to be too ethnocentric. but there is, i must admit, a small part of me that gets really irritated when companies send these jobs overseas. now i live in new york and can therefore understand any accent. unlike some people i can understand the indian operators just fine, but the indian operators cannot understand me. and that irritates me too.
i say operators because it took two calls to intuit to get my discounted price. that’s how i’m sure the call center was in india–both operators had indian accents. one could be a coincidence, but two within 30 minutes confirms it. anyway, i dialed the number buried on the intuit site, and the first operator was useless. just repeatedly told me without explanation that i had to wait 48 hours and call back.
so i went online to view the charge, and another phone number was listed as a contact. so i called that number, got another indian operator who was at least more helpful but who understood me even less than the first one. i mean, how many times do i have to respell “fidelity.com”?–f as in frank; i as in, well, in; d as in…well, you get the idea.
and she eventually gave me my refund and was helpful in that “i’m overtrained and reading from my screens” kind of way. but she all the time kept insisting that it was my fault for not following the link properly, and she kept telling me in that grandmotherly kind of way to “make sure i followed the link next year.” in the interest of keeping my newly-given discount i ignored her, but the third time she said it was too much.
so i let her know that i did, and that the url had the discount code, and that it was a problem with the site, and could she report that problem to the proper authorities?
she ignored me. and then exhorted me, one last time, to make sure to follow that link next year.
now, i must admit that my problem was eventually resolved to my satisfaction, assuming that actually do get my discount refunded to my credit card. but, first of all, it took two phone calls. and, second of all, the damn site should have worked correctly in the first place. and third of all, i should not have to be so persistent to get my frigging refund.
and, fourth of all, and i can’t believe i’m saying this, hire some damn americans to fuck up my order. they wouldn’t do any better of a job, of course. but at least their incompetence and intransigence would contribute positively to our domestic economy.
intuit. geez. they do one thing right as a company. which is they tie up your financial information so that, once you start using their products, you have no choice but to keep using their products even though you just know that they will eventually let you down and piss you off.
why do i use turbo tax year after year? because i started out using it years ago, and it’s more easy to click that “transfer your info from last year” button than to start from scratch elsewhere.
same reason i keep using quicken. the program that mistook the phrase “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” for a raison d’etre.
that’s all. i feel better now.