If you respond to that you will put their customer support system into a deadly embrace; if you can afford to dedicate a box to doing this, it would probably be a public service.

Everything we can tell you is on our website. If you would like to be told this a second time, please use the email address below.

It would be wrong to email them for information, right?

It might be wrong for one of us to do it, but it would be oh-so-right for all of us to do it.

Is this the place to suggest that the pianist Dong-suk Kang should adopt an English name, for exampe "Daniel" or "Donald"?

No! Dong-suk forever! He should, however, consider getting an apartment with Professor Chew Shit Fun.

I just finished living through what I thought was going to be "No Exit" performed in email with Dell as my co-star.

Suffice it to say I got their last and totally useless email a full week after the whole mess had been taken care of by DHL's "Andrea", who actually read, thought about, and then solved the problem without a bead of sweat showing.

OTOH, the (Indian) guy I dealt with from APC's service couldn't have been better. About the only thing annoying about APC's CS is the sheer number of "How are we doing?" surveys that follow a purchase and any service. On the third hand, they must be reading them.

Hung Far Low in Portland, as has been said here, is real, and my family has been going there for almost fifty years.

Oh, yes, useless emails from Dell about support issues. That sounds familiar. I had a fun one with Norton recently when I was simply complaining about the poor performance of one of their products, not expecting a fix. The guy I got continued to think that it was highly relevant to direct me to the Support Database and run me through things like "is your computer turned on" and "are you a living organism", etcetera.

That sounds a lot like what's happening here: there's a simple answer, and there's all the stuff they're required to say/do by their manual. "We haven't released it yet, so there's no info on that," is a fine answer, but appending "let me know if I've answered your question," which I'm sure is the standard last line of every response they send, is silly.

7: Amazing how rare it is that customer service people actually read your e-mail. I expect that on the first pass, as it gets past the bots, but when they ask you for information, you provide exactly the information requested, in exactly the order and format requested, by precisely the means requested (read: stooopid web form), then a presumptive human asks you to provide the information AGAIN as if you were starting from scratch? Grr. I'm talking to YOU, Travelocity.

Oh come on. You have to admire the honesty.

I would short it, but it isn't public yet.

Helio is a joint venture between SK Telecom (NYSE: SKM), Korea's leading mobile communications company, and EarthLink (NASDAQ: ELNK), the nation's next generation Internet service provider.

Hee.

Tom noted that the company might not be around for very long. But the phone sure seems cool.

A Dell customer service lady in Bangalore saved my butt recently. She went way beyond what she needed to do, totally hacking into my no-longer-supported operating system, spelling out the names of files over the phone. I sent appreciative letters about her in every direction I could find.

15: Yeah, to be fair, there was, last year, another Dell guy (I don't know where he was located) who, after starting the trouble-shooting flow for a defective CD drive, cut it short and said, "Oh, wait. I can hear it grinding. That one is bad, we're sending you a new one". And they did with no problems.