hammers, dumb as a sack of

[waider]

• Dealing with another telco, this one the shower who provide my cellphone service. At some point over the last $period, all my online bills, invoices and call logs were replaced with Folger's Crystals^W^Wblank pages. When I emailed customer care to enquire about this, they asked me to email my self-service access passwords (there are two) to them. Now, the second password is just the last four digits of my customer account number, which I refuse to believe they don't have access to, but seriously, kids. Send you my password by email? HELLO? La la la. So I changed the password to something else, then sent them that on the princple that it's not my SEEKRIT password and I can change it back when they fix the problem. I will skip over the fact that the three-ring binders I gave the password to cannot possibly have sufficient access to fix the problem if they don't have access to my password information or a system that allows them to pretend to be me, but I really can't be bothered having another protracted argument with a telco.
• In dealing with the above, I notice that each of their emails ends with the following paragraph:

  Can I also ask you when replying to this mail, to reply with history so we have all details below.

  From past experience, I know that this means "please top-reply because we don't understand the whole "quoted text comes before reply" thing", and I note with the current exchange that they don't seem to adhere to their own advice.
• On the end of one of the mails:

  For information on self services options and Vodafone Products and Services , please go to www. vodafone.ie\my vodafone

  With that exact formatting: a space after the first dot, and a backslash, and a space after the word "my". Which, needless to say, is not exactly a functional URL.
• Finally, work-related: an image-installer, akin to Ghost. Except apparently it can't repartition a disk; it gives no indication when you should put in the "Main" disk; the "Main" disk is the last disk in the set, but it doesn't prompt you to swap things around and put in the first disk before it attempts to restore the image; and when it comes time to change the disk, it alerts you with... a media error. Yes, it tries to read off the end of the disk, and when you click "Retry", it suggests you insert the next disk. Outstanding.