Here’s a screenshot from our Southwest Airlines Rapid Rewards account page. A key piece of data is that “16” is a magic number; after 16 flight credits (most commonly in the form of 8 round trips), you get a free ticket. It’s easily the simplest and lowest-bullshit affinity program we can think of:

Now, what’s broken there is the “Credits earned” line, which clearly shows 16. That’s technically true; the rolling window they show there does in fact include 16 credits. However, that’s misleading and weird, since what they’re NOT showing is that we broke the 16 barrier in January and were issued an award ticket that, if we recall correctly, Mrs Heathen used to visit the L’ilest Heathen Niece. Their figure of “16” includes both spent and unspent credits, and is therefore about as useful as tits on a bull (or, more concretely, a check register showing only deposits).

Thinking there was a problem, we actually called SWA for clarification, which means this little interface flub has cost them money. Once you know what they’re doing, it’s easy to infer the actual credit balance using the second figure, but it’s not obvious. Math (arithmetic, really) isn’t vexing to nonstupid humans, but the data presentation is — especially considering SWA’s usual level of quality.

(Yes, we stole the title.)