I used to do technical support/help-desk work and I promised myself that I would never go nuts on a poor tech support person if I had a problem with my computer. I have been the recipient of many rants and have been made to feel pretty bad about my company and their lack of competence.

While I usually was able to resolve problems, my customers often brought up valid points that needed to be addressed. These points would be passed up our chain of command to ensure that each and every one of our customer complaints would be ignored by the highest ranking officials in the company.

Needless to say, when the customers said that we didn't care about them, they were right. Also needless to say, I do not do technical support any more.

I do remember occasionally receiving email that would get copied and passed around because of its unusual content. Most of the time these were death threats, other potentially "dangerous" emails, or ignorant ramblings, but once in a while we would receive an extrememly insightful or humorous email that accurately depicted why the "little" problems that they were experiencing were a source of incredible annoyance.

It is in this last fashion that I try to write my complaints to technical support. For instance, I had a tough evening with my computer recently and I had a big problem that required an insane answer. After "resolving" this problem, I decided to do something a bit easier...

I want to create new folders for my Hotmail account.

Here are the steps I have followed (taken directly from the Help page):

After a rough day of dealing with absolutely insane Microsoft pieces of junk such as "Documagix Help Files" that offer no help and were written by geeks for people that have no need of any specific information, I figured that creating a folder in my Hotmail account would be the perfect antidote to such lunatic endeavors.

Of course, this doesn't work and the help files give me no idea where to start troubleshooting the problem.

Some things I have tried:

• At first I thought that I was using unacceptable characters in the folder name. I then used underscores instead of spaces, still no new folders.
• After this, I made sure that I didn't use any capital letters, still no folders.
• I was finally reduced to using a single lower-case letter for the name of the folder and, yes, you guessed it, still no folder.
• I stopped just short of taking a magic marker and writing a fake folder entry directly on the computer screen. (My wife took the marker away from me before I could get the cap off of it.)

I realize that this is a relatively unimportant issue.

The only problem is that my computer and all of its sofware has somehow been able to deduce that of all days, THIS day is the one when I actually need my software to work.

After struggling to send out a single fax (a 3 hour feat which required that I dig up another computer out of mothballs, drop plain text documents to a floppy disk, troubleshoot the mothballed computer's modem and then fax the document with an archaic Windows 3.1 program), I figured that I could archive some important files on this email account and feel better for having actually accomplished something without having to do brain surgery. I have other hotmail accounts that I have created idiotic folders for (e.g. "Urgent Pornography," "Phyllis Diller Erotica," and "Hate Mail for Dwarfs"), and yet when I have to archive IMPORTANT email, it does not work.

Please fix the Hotmail issue, better yet, just send someone to my house to kill me. Death has to be better than having the All Knowing Microsoft find a way to ruin every single thing I've worked on today.

Christ, what a day I'm having.

Sincerely,

Frank Emsley.