Sunday, October 29, 2006

Entering numbers

We are ordering lot of things (clothes, books, kids' toys) online. Which leaves me with the task of paying the bills found in the parcels. That's not too bad because I can do it onine. The only thing that annoys the hell out of me is transcribing all those numbers (account, bank, customer, invoice) from the paper copy into my web browser.

I don't have anything against typing numbers in general, but why don't they group them e.g. by 4? With hyphens in between? Most likely because the wise programmers of the severly fucked up web-frontend to my bank decided that anything but numbers in most fields is a bad thing. Therefore don't even allow such a readability-increasing method in their various number-eating input-boxes. Oh, and please somebody explain to me why a invoice number has to be 15 digits? Especially when paying a bill from a relatively small german publisher who - for sure - has less than 1015 customers whom to bill. Suddenly typing in microsofts 8x4 character license keys does not look like a bad amusement at all.

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