so i got a speeding ticket when i was driving back from mexico a few weekends ago. unfortunate, but well deserved (92 in a 65). i am trying to be a good citizen and take the defensive driving course so that i will not have points added to my license. anyhow, i see that i can take the course online, so of course, i opt for that scenario as opposed to sitting in a classroom for 5 hours.

when attempting to pay for the course, i keep getting this (terribly non-descript) error about my information being missing or incorrect. i call the help line because i know i’m not an idiot, and the technical assistance guy on the other end logs in and attempts to do the same thing that i just did (like i don’t know how to type and hadn’t tried several times already) so he says “i think this may be a technical error” (no! really??) and that there will be a girl coming in in ~1 hour who can take a look at it. me being the impatient techie coder that i am, decided to check it myself.

so i get off the phone with mr techincal assistance and view the source code of the page, turns out their code is there embedded in the html for all to see (which is very bad practice, didn’t anyone ever teach these people anything??) so i see the function that is parsing my credit card number and low and behold, it doesn’t account for a 4 digit number beginning with a zero…so to test my theory, i change the leading zero in my credit card number to a 1 and resubmit, and of course it goes through without the idiotic error message. i call back the guy and let him know what the problem is so that the girl can fix it and that they also have my incorrect credit card number. why do i do things like this? because i can’t help it…it’s just who i am, a nerd.