I don’t recall exactly when I wrote this, I’m guessing it was 2003 or so. I just found this text in an old ‘stickie’ on my work mac and figured I’d post it here. Backdating so it doesn’t show up as current:
Dear Union Trust Representatives;
For the the record, I am VERY upset with the downtime for your Bill Pay service for this past weekend, and now for the next week. I don’t care if I am not being billed this month, what I care about is that your service, which I have come to rely on, is now down during a prime bill paying time of the month and this will cause me a bunch of extra work, since I have come to throw out return envelopes and file bills that are regularly paid online.
Pardon me for trusting that an institution with millions of dollars in assets might spend enough to offer their services without interuption. I find it very irresponsible that your upgrades were not planned better and that your service experienced any downtime at all, let alone a amjor failure of more than 10 days! I am computer system administrator and am familiar with industry standard practices and setups that guarantee 99.999% uptime for critical services, and I see no reason why your systems should incur such a critical failure, expecially a service that is only available to online users and thus requires even a higher level of reliability since there is no offline equivalent. Would you ever turn off your ATMs for a week? I see this service as equally critical, apparently you do not.
I will spend this downtime researching offerings by other local banks that now offer bill pay services. I suggest you spend some time reviewing your IT department procedures and level of service you plan to offer your customers in the future.
Very upset;
Matthew & Emily Baya