ComEd and Microsoft: A Mess of Spaghetti Held Together By Circus Clowns
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.
Today, I went to pay my electric bill with ComEd and got the usual Microsoft Azure garbage.
Several years ago SeaMonkey logged in and I could pay my bill even with that. Then they switched their infrastructure to Microsoft Azure and SeaMonkey could no longer pay a bill unless I was logged out and it only told me how much I owed and nothing else.
Then, over the last year at some point, they stopped sending one time authentication codes to Firefox users. You could click “Text”, “Call”, or “Authenticator App”, and nothing happens, so you’d get the code but it was impossible to enter it without a Chrome-based Web browser.
So today I used Chrome to pay my electric bill, and right after I hit “submit”, the entire Web site just stopped responding completely. This is normal since they started using Microsoft Azure, but it’s never happened in the middle of a payment before.
So I had to keep hammering on the log in button until the site came back up, it was working again, but very slowly. I checked to make sure the payment didn’t hit my card and that there were no pending payments showing on ComEd, and then I made the payment again and got the confirmation number.
So it takes like 20 minutes to pay an electric bill now and you hope the site works at all, and you have to check to see if the payment went through when Microsoft Azure stopped again in the middle of you doing something, and it only works in Chrome.
If you ask it to call you, the Caller ID even pops up and says “Microsoft”.
LOL
It would be funny, perhaps, but the electric choice law makes it too dangerous to get paper bills and just tear off the coupon and send it in that way, because if scammers jack open your mailbox, pretend to be you, sign you up for “a different power company”, which are all more expensive because of the Green New Scam or just because they trick people with teaser rates then their bill doubles, then you can have a hell of a time getting out of that mess.
How it works is basically they steal your electric bill out of the mail or show up at your door pretending to be the electric company and say they need your account number and then they forge your signature and get a commission and even steal your $100 prepaid Visa card that you were supposed to get (to bait the trap).
These companies don’t really care who signed that form or if it was you. They hire criminals to go through the neighborhood and then if the state asks who forged your name, they say they’re “shocked, shocked to find gambling in this establishment!” (Archive Today)
These fake energy companies, are well aware that scammers and miscreants and criminals that they hire are up to this, and they don’t care. When and if the police make an issue of it, they throw these people under the bus and nobody higher up goes to prison.
The problem has gotten so bad that ComEd had to do an ad campaign over the radio saying don’t show your electric bill to people that come to the door, it’s not us.
It seems to happen about every two or three months here. I don’t know who lets them in. I always shout that they’d better leave because this is now a matter for the police.
They’re always gone before the police get here.
Too many problems from the power company.
Paying your power bill should just work. Their site is twitchy and full of spaghetti code and lulz, and a bunch of Microsoft domains that say Microsoft, Azure, and “Windows” (blob dot windows dot net or something), so I’m not terribly surprised that I’m having to make an afternoon out of doing something that just worked 10 years ago. █