## On the day of the episode, Mom got transported to the hospital by the ## county EMS service. Medicare covers part of that, but the remainder is ## out-of-pocket billed to the transportee. More than a month afterward, a ## paper bill arrived from the county fire/amulance department, also showing ## some kind of online payment-portal which I thought might be more convenient ## to try. Well, not so: going at it from my usual deny-everything browser ## platform stance, expecting to allow certain things stepwise, I ran into ## enough stupidity that I tried to simply call the support for their billing ## platform. That was a fail; whoever answered there didn't want to hear ## about it, and hung up on me. So I fired a rant into their support ## web-form, which basically sent them email in the backend. To wit: Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2022 11:32 AM From: [me, via web-form:] Pay Ambulance To: EmsOnlineBillPayPortal Subject: Sarasota County Fire Department Payambulance Contact Us Request for contact submission: Email How shall we contact you: Email Invoice Number: rxffd51504 Date of Service: 09/05/2022 Customer Comments: The "digitech" website payambulance.com makes so many rookie errors, it's not even funny. First, if an invoice has lowercase characters in it, it is not accepted! Any programmer worth its salt will convert user-entered fields to whatever is needed for comparison/lookup, that's like programming 101. Then, you are loading random third-party resources like "bootstrap" and "telerik" and expecting script execution will just be allowed to those sites without any protection/intervention. By doing that, you are extending your own security perimeter into resources you don't control, thus putting your visitors at increased risk. Whenever you're dealing with financials, you need to pull those items IN-HOUSE and vet them before serving them out locally. Your customer-service phone reps are also RUDE and refuse to take any bug reports. So I'm giving up on the supposed "convenience" of online payments. Congratulations. If you want to engage in adult and fairly technical discussion, feel free to reach back out. ## ## Well, they sort of responded, but in a purely defensive way. And that ## email itself was laced with all kinds of space-wasting HTML and about ## FIVE completely useless image attachments. ## ## People in functions like this just have no clue what their online presence ## really involves, and how it increases everyone's frustration and risk. ## Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2022 18:58:03 +0000 From: Rebecca Scott CC: Nicole Simmons , Fran Cuzzo Subject: RE: Sarasota County Fire Department Payambulance Contact Us Good Afternoon, I do apologize for the inconveniences. The online web portal is case sensitive. If you feel more comfortable, you can send in a check or money order. I will note the account, just to confirm the INV# is [...] Thank you. Rebecca Scott Patient Collections Supervisor 480 Bedford Road, Bldg. 600, 2nd floor Chappaqua, NY 10514 ## Since paper checks are increasingly considered "burdensome" by accounting ## departments, that's what they'll get.