Last night, I accidentally ordered a pair of pants while trying to get an estimate on shipping speed. Not only is the shipping going to take much longer than I’d hoped, I realized afterwards that I had the wrong size as well. No big deal, I thought, I’ll cancel the order.
Well, you can’t on their website. So I had to wait until this morning to call. I called them up as soon as they opened, hoping to get someone before the pants shipped out. And I did! Only, they still can’t cancel the order. They have to ship the pants across the country to me, and then I have to ship them back across the country to return them. The person I talked to even offered to print out the return label, and ship it with the pants!
Such a wasteful, broken system. I can only imagine it works the way it does to make people who have second thoughts on a purchase have to jump through additional hoops to cancel it.
I’ve never heard this term before. It makes perfect sense for what it represents. Sorry it sounds like you speak from experience 😅
Technical debt applies not just to coding! (though it’s most often talked about in that context) It’s the general idea that whenever you rush a project by taking shortcuts, you have to spend more time later to sort it out (and let’s be honest, it’s never actually going to get sorted out)
It’s a serious term in IT! One of those things that’s recognized as an issue, and then blown off IRL.
Think of paying down a monster credit card bill while living like a monk. Only same thing to do, but it hurts in the short and midterm. Long term, you gonna pay far more.