Obsession with twngan

UCLA is a top public school with a prestigious CS department. There's a large influx of interns that turned to full time employees in my company. But more importantly, it has the third best medical center in US, which is exactly why I'm a patient there. You'd have thought that with this combination they would have the best technology at their disposal. Well, I'm in no position to judge their medical equipments, but certainly that's not the case for their billing system.

It used to be that the only option for paying is to snailmail them --- either with a check or a credit card number. It got me excited when they decided to create a new billing system to allow you to skip mailing. No, they still don't have a web payment system, but now you can use the next best thing: the telephone network.

I figured it would still beat mailing a credit card number. So I called and expected to input my credit card number with touch-tone. Apparently that's still too advanced. They actually wanted me to read aloud my account number, name, credit card number, etc to create a voice message for someone to manually process later. After thinking for a second, I decided to save stamp and take the more convenience route of reading my credit card number to a machine.

But the WTF didn't stop there. I got a call a few days later, and was told there was something wrong and they couldn't get the payment processed. But I didn't have the card with me, and had to tell the lady to call back later. Yada, yada, yada...

They finally exceeded themselves. They made their billing system even worse than the worst possible.