more fun from customer service

I swear, I must have a global flag on any customer service query I initiate with any company that says, "please do your utmost to not help this person". Admittedly I am biased in favour of using email for customer service as I hate dealing with phones, voicemail, hold music, etc. But you know, if your company offers customer service by email, you should maybe honour that offer, as opposed to ignoring the customers who use it.

Source of this whine:

• Sony: I registered, or attempted to register, my NW-S23 MP3ATRAC player on both the European and American "My Sony" sites. The European site doesn't recognise the model, because (I presume) it's American, and the American site doesn't recognise the model because, er, why doesn't it? My emailed query received an autoreply telling me that the issue would be dealt with in "two business days". About a week later I got a generic "thank you we'll pass that to our website people", which didn't answer anything in particular that I'd asked, and on Friday - three weeks after the initial query - I got a "not our problem" mail which - form letter that it is - makes absolutely no reference to the original query and in fact tells me that the part of Sony customer support I reached is only responsible for [list of stuff which covers my query] and I should go ask someone else. Choice.
• My good friends at Vodafone are currently mishandling a new query, wherein I have asked if it's possible to block third-party SMS spam from premium-rate services. This, you will notice, is a yes/no question. I didn't phrase it as "if you can do this please do so", but that appears to be how it was interpreted, because after a week I got a message asking me to confirm my account details (over email! how secure!) which I replied to (oh well, can't hurt to tell everyone my seekrits, eh?) and that was a week ago. Vodafone claim to respond to emailed issues within 24 hours.

how do you remind yourself to buy one?

(blurry image courtesy of phonecam)
(it says, "REPLACEMENT HEAD")

deja vu

Just seen on Irish Times Breaking News: "Iran leader vows to fight till death if US attacks". News should be easy for the next few months:

grep -i iraq last-two-years-of-news.txt | sed -e 's/q$/n/gi' -e 's/qi/ian/gi'