Not impressed, NUS

I received my NUS student card today. One resolution fulfilled: yaaay! Money off: yaaay! NUS aparrently sucks: booo!

According to my archives, I filled in the form during a boring Chemistry lesson on 1st February, and my mum posted it the week after. On 19th February I received two emails confirming that I had bought the card and my order was being processed, and in my post on the 22nd February I confirmed that I was expecting it that week, as it had said in one of the emails. However, as I have now realised reading over both emails carefully (sent from the same address, confirming the same thing with only an attachment on one to differ them) I have realised that one says

Your card will take approximately 7 working days to be produced and delivered and we’ll send you an email when your card is ready.

while the other says

When your card is ready we will send it back to the address you provided on your application form. This should take around two weeks. We will send you an email to let you know when your card is on its way to you.

Fail #1. Fail number two is that I got the email and the card today, almost a month after it was ordered, and well over two (or three) weeks after it was expected.

Fail #3: card isn’t very good quality, my photo’s off centre, they’ve got the name of my school different to how I wrote it on the form (I wrote it how it is usually written AND they’ve missed out the apostrophes), the expiry date is this year despite my assumption that it would last until I finished school since that was what they asked me on the form, and on the back they’ve got a ridiculous set of numbers (listing 1-10 at the top) as if it were some kid’s fake toy.

I was informed by the email today that I would have to activate the card to use it online. They had already set up my account (supposedly with the information I provided on the form) so I logged in to the website, and activated it.

Fail #4. I also spotted a link for “Scotalnd” but it disappeared soon after.

Fail #5 and #6 came when I went to my account and started editing and adding information. Rather amusingly I noticed you have to tick the “I am not a student” box to be able to fill in your education information (if you uncheck it the section collapses).

At the same time I tried to edit my password. Bam! I was logged out with an “error” and had to log back in with my old password. At that point I was greeted with a welcome message which I was too irritated to screenshot: “Welcome, Ann! This is your first visit to the NUS website, we hope you blah de blah”. Yeah, I hope so too. I was asked to fill in some new info about myself: everything I had already filled in on my form. When I discovered my school was not on the list of schools in England I gave up and went back to try and change a few things again. As you see, my display name (they’d provided Ann for me already) is a necessary field (yes, I tried leaving it blank, it comes up with the error you’d expect).

(click to enlarge)

Thanks for the free stuff, NUS. Now go back to school and learn how to do stuff properly yourself.

Tags: email, Rants, resolutions, student, websites