As has often been said, it isn't the despair which hurts, it's the hope. Apparently you're an inveterate optimist.

Just to give you another data point, I switched electricity and gas providers earlier this year. In some senses the new lot haven't been too bad, but my attempt to register to deal with things online was a bad joke. Went through a couple of secure pages, then got a fat error message. Tried again, same result. Lather rinse repeat. So, I sent them a bug report detailing exactly where I was getting the error message, in the follish hope that they might try to fix the website. After several days of nothing, I got an email message from a customer service muppet, suggesting that I send all those important details in an unsecured email message. Wasn't overly surprised, but Bah. As an aside, the voice recognition software on their bill-paying service is excellent, except that it hasn't been set up to recognise the year 2006 as a possible "valid from" year for credit and debit cards, so you wind up talking to some underpaid eejit and bumping up their costs. Double bah.