Text vs GUI (was RE: Antiquated Software)

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2006, Kenneth Brody wrote:
...
>The tellers at my bank have shiny flat-panel Windows 2000 workstations
>with pretty GUI screens for doing deposits/withdrawals.  But, if you
>need to have them do something else, like look up your account number
>via SSN, or check your account history for some mysterious charge that
>appeared on your statement, guess what?  They switch to another window
>for a character-based telnet/ssh session.

One of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen in this vein was at
Washington Mutual when I opened a SEP IRA account.  Instead of entering the
pertinent information into a database screen, then automatically printing
the necessary forms for me to sign, they created a new M$-Word document for
each form, then manually entered the same data repeatedly.  An operation
that should have taken five minutes took at least a half-hour.

Given that I already had two checking accounts at that bank, it should have
taken less time if they could have just entered a checking account number,
and gotten my information from that.

Bill
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