I have student loans, a naive participant in an unforgiving $1 Trillion industry. Yes, it is an industry, and one you can only get out from under if you labor for ten years, or if you get really lucky, or if you die (well, maybe if you die…the jury is still out on this one.) You would think that an industry with this much damn money would get on board to make it as easy as possible for folks to pay their student loans. Or maybe not, if they really are criminals.

At this point, there is no excuse for the folks at Citibank or Hinsen-Hazlewood to have sites that are inoperable on anything but Internet Explorer. It is lazy and it is dishonest. I bring this up because I experienced first-hand what happens when you accidentally use another browser. You can go through the entire monthly payment process, submit your payment, land on the confirmation page and for some reason, because you didn’t use IE, your payment fails to process. What the hell is up with that? And because you were given a confirmation page, you don’t double check until you get a late notice in the mail and a penalty fee.

The internet has come a long, long way, and Internet Explorer can’t claim more than 25-30% of the browser usage in the US today. So, I ask the question again. What web developer, who is getting payed millions of dollars to build these platforms for these banks can honestly say that Internet Explorer is the only way to go? If you come across any website that says that it cannot do what it was designed to do outside of Internet Explorer, contact their webmaster and put “What a Load of BS!” in the header.