25 October 2010 · corporate, quality assurance, stupidity, web site

So, during a brief engagement with ING Direct's web site I receive the following error message:
 It was complaining because a) I had used a one-digit form for the month (i.e. 9/19/2010 rather than 09/19/2010), and b) because I had just entered the telephone numbers, as is my wont, as ten-digit strings.

What I want to know is, is there any user-centered QA in effect on this site? Who exactly decreed that dates had to be entered in that inflexible format? Who reviewed the stupid decision to require that specific format for telephone numbers, when it's actually much easier to simply throw away anything that isn't a digit, store that and then format numbers when they are printed? Finally, does anyone at ING care how much trouble they put their users to?

See, I've been in the business long enough to remember the days when computers were there to make things easier for user-type people, not for the programmers. This is clearly a lost approach, one sees so many ridiculous requirements such as the above.