I got an email a couple of days ago about my Flickr Pro account. It’s time to renew my account, which is fine; I’ve been a member for nine years and I’m very happy overall with Flickr as a service. In years past I’ve been able to renew it with no problem, but 2014 is different. Apparently they’ve gone to some kind of “wallet” construct for their payment services, which means they want to store your payment information (um…OK) and tie it to your account. Mind you, this is a Flickr wallet. Here’s the issue: There’s no way to apply my card to the bill. When I enter my card information (correctly) into the wallet, I get the cryptic message: “There was an error.”

So, tell me what I’m supposed to do, Yahoo. Do I put my credit card in again? (Did that. Twice. Didn’t work).

Do I click on the Order History links? (they don’t do a fucking thing).

Do I go to Yahoo and log in there and attempt to find my billing information and clear it up there? (Ha, that’s a goddamn joke. I can barely find the “Log In” button, let alone any billing information. And when I did find a link to the billing page, after a goddamn Google search, they had all my old invoices but not the new one).

Here are a couple of entry-level, UI 101, common sense suggestions to the wizards at Yahoo:

• When there’s an error, tell me clearly what the problem is.
• Don’t fuck with best practices, especially when it comes to important stuff like payments.
• Give me some information about what I can do to fix it so that I can give you my money.

So I have to call someone and sit on hold and try to clear it up tomorrow. Stupid fucks.