I have written several times in the gadgets section about the virtues of ExxonMobil’s Speedpass. I was one of the earliest users and continue to find it a time-saver. Unfortunately, today I saw the dark side of SpeedPass. The last few times I have attempted to use it, both with my car and motorcycles, it has not worked and I had to either pay cash or use a credit card the old way. Normally, the gas station attendant is not aware of what the problem is, but this morning the owner of the local Mobil station happened to be in and he knew the problem — the credit card affiliated with my Speedpass had expired.

I knew this was true because I have been receiving emails from various e-businesses asking me to "click here to update your credit card information". This has worked very smoothly at most sites. Since I was at the Mobil station and it was fresh in my mind, I called Speedpass on the Samsung i330 The person was very helpful and said she could handle it quickly — she just needed to ask me a few questions first. Name, credit card account number, and new date of expiration. No problem. Then she asked "for verification purposes" what my email address is. I told her [email][email protected][/email]. "Ok", she said, "everything is set". I asked why, since they have my email address, that they didn’t send me an email to tell me that my card on file had expired and "click here to update". She said it is their policy to not use the email address. I asked why they had asked me for it in the first place. She explained that some people don’t like email and that email addresses are always changing. She said they just use it for verification purposes on the phone *and* to send promotional information. Good enough for promotional purposes but not good enough to provide a simple value added service for their customers. This is not e-business on demand. I asked her how she felt about this personally — she agreed that some people would prefer to receive an email and that if I wanted to make that suggestion, she could me the address to which to write a letter!