Stupid ETS
December 1st, 2004
My wife took TOEFL and GRE for the application of graduate schools. She needed some additional score reports, so I had to call ETS and order them for her. However, I need to fix some glitches before putting order.
My wife’s name is misplaced on both her GRE and TOEFL score reports, thanks for reckless Bill of Camarillo Prometric. For TOEFL, things is a bit easier, they let me correct it over the phone. I believe that it’s 2004 now but seems that TOEFL is still in good old 80’s, which implies they love phones and faxes so that you can not make the order on Internet. Great. I have to speak everything over the phone and finally got things dealed and credit card charged after 30 minutes (10 minutes waiting in the line, 5 for name correction, and another 15 for orders).
Well, TOEFL is not wonderful enough, let’s check out the GRE department. The GRE folks are more conservative so I have to fax over the photocopy of my wife’s passport and make the name correction. Okay, that’s understandable. The stupidity is that GRE department has only one fax line, and they also use that line to accept orders for additional score reports. You know what? It’s Dec 1 today, and most graduate school has a Dec 15 deadline for application. As a result, you got to be real lucky to dial in their fax line because people all over the world are trying that little 9.6k fax line around the clock. My innocent little fax machine tried 12 hours in vain. I’m a guy with great sympathy so that I stopped the poor fax machine and wait 15 minutes on the phone to beg GRE folks give me another god damn fax number. Well, they give me one. Guess what? It’s also jammed! So I have to wait another 15 minutes on the phone to beg them give me another one. This time I am lucky enough to fax it over, thanks god. I have to call them after 24 hours to make sure they received and processed that. Great.
Com’on ETS, I believe you guys should be clever enough to be qualified of providing computer science subject test. Didn’t your professors teach you that your way of doing business is not scalable? Just hire a consultant for three months to do some simple ASP/JSP/PHP/whatever design and you will have on-line order for score reports. Free the fax line for we poor guys who need to pass over those damn photo copies so that you don’t need to read e-mail and view the attached digital-cam-photoed documents.
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