Hadar bought a Toshiba laptop a year ago. Approximately. I don’t know exactly when. Why would i want to know such a useless thing? For warranty? Thank God, no. The laptop works, although Windows Vista makes it work about 20 times slower than it is supposed to, which doesn’t stop Toshiba from recommending it.
No, i am supposed to want to know the date that i purchased this laptop in order to log in to the Toshiba website. Why would i want to log in to the Toshiba website? That i don’t know, actually, but they sent me an email asking me to renew my membership, and i’m nice, so i usually do things that people ask from me if i don’t have to bother too much.
So anyway, this website asks me for the user name. OK, i enter my usual amire80 and my usual password and it doesn’t work. So i enter my second option, amir_e_a, and it doesn’t work. So i enter my email amir.aharoni@gmail.com as the user name, which is actually a reasonable thing to use as a user name. But it doesn’t work.
So i looked at the email, where i saw the string amir.aharoni@gmail.com_IL somewhere. So i tried that as the user name and it didn’t work. I didn’t give up and entered it as the user name in the password reminder form. And it worked.
And then it asked me for the date when i purchased the laptop with that serial number (see the image).
How could it be stupider? I mean, this question is a bit less ridiculous than my mother’s last name, but how the fuck am i supposed to remember the exact date when i purchased? Do you actually expect me to dig up the receipt to find that date? Asking me for the serial number would be reasonable—i can look it up on the laptop itself. But the date?
And oh—does it mean that anyone can enter any email address, schlep an “_IL” (or “_US” or “_RU” or “_IQ”) at the end and find out whether that email’s owner has a Toshiba laptop, and its serial number, too? That’s a direct violation of their privacy policy.
Now, check out this part of their email. Read this slowly: “If you don’t activate your profile for our personalised website experience we will delete it after one month. That also means you will not receive any alerts anymore. We would like to make you aware that with this process you do not withdraw from your permission to allow Toshiba to contact you.”
What idiot wrote that? That same idiot that put “EMEA” on that website. “EMEA” means “Europe, Middle East and Africa”. It’s a term commonly used in marketing departments. It is supposed to be internal. I am a customer, Toshiba; i am not supposed to give a damn about how you run your marketing department.
And Ubuntu doesn’t work so well on that laptop, too. (Although when it does work, it works 20 times faster than Windows Vista.)
No more Toshiba laptops, then.
Aharoni in Unicode 