Joburg’s eservices site isn’t dishing out accounts online any more. A message reads on the account-by-email page:
IMPORTANT NOTICE TO CUSTOMERS WHO RECEIVE THEIR ACCOUNT BY EMAIL: We are in the process of enhancing the viewing of accounts online. Please note that your online account from March 2008 until further notice will not be available online to view. This however will not affect the monthly email distribution of accounts. If you stopped receiving your account by email, contact our Statement Distribution Department: statements@joburg.org.za
I do get my account emailed in PDF format though, so to conveniently pay my account by mail, I:-
- log into Gmail with my Gmail client on my phone. My client’s firewall blocks Gmail (and proxies. Behave!).
- Oops, phone’s connection is broken. Reboot phone.
Keep clicking “Yes, I want to continue my internet banking session” pop-up while I wait for it to come to its senses.- Use Pocket Internet Explorer to go to gmail.com, should be the quickest, yes? Search for account, try to download. Can’t download PDF. In fact, couldn’t download anything of mobile Gmail since its inception.
- Fire up Esmertec Java and load Gmail client again.
- Find email and click on PDF link.
- Gmail client dishes up plain-text PDF which is spectacularly useless. And I still cannot download the PDF.
- I have one last shot at this. Fire up Opera Mini, and go to Gmail.com. Login, find email, download PDF, open in Acrobat Reader LE, see amount of R1470.98, pay.
Total time wasted by blind corporate proxy? 40 minutes. Of course, I could just tether my cellphone and use its Internet Sharing but that’s not allowed either. Sometimes the most basic tasks make you feel like a complete clown.
Garfield strip created here (via The Generator Blog: January 2006)