Elmo Keep is a legal name, but the Australian woman who uses it got booted from Facebook because of it anyway. Facebook's customer sevice drones didn't let her back on the site — and in fact wouldn't tell her why she was banned. Until she mailed them copies of her passport and driver's license, always a risky…
AT&T's service agreement runs to 8,000 words — about twice the length of a Wired magazine feature. But it still doesn't list all the details. You'll have to hit the Web for AT&T's 2,500-page guidebook. California state regulators blame themselves for loosening rules in hopes of increasing competition. I went through…
It's gotta be some kind of world record: A former (we're guessing: fired) Verizon technician in New Jersey spent 15 weeks' time in the past 40 weeks on sex-chat lines. WCBS-TV has the minimal info available so far:
A tipster writes us to complain about eBay subsidiaries Skype and PayPal's response to identity theft. Reading his letter, which we've copied below, you'll see the problem is not so much that Skype and PayPal wouldn't refund the money the thief spent using our tipster's account. Rather, it's how inefficiently the…
The Federal Communications Commission will probably approve AT&T's request to stop filing annual reports on customer satisfaction and service quality. AT&T's angle actually makes sense: Most of the giant telco's modern competitors — cellular and Internet phone companies — don't have to file the data. The FCC is…
AT&T has launched a "Geek Squad meets Fire Dog" IT service called AT&T ConnecTech. The company told USA Today that ConnecTech will provide home technical services in all 50 states: Home networking. Household tech support. Home theater installation. Having dealt with AT&T's "We don't have to — we're the phone…
As if fanboys of Apple and Google weren't shrill and relentless enough! The American Customer Satistfaction Index has ranked Apple tops in personal computers and Google tops in Internet portals and search engines. Yahoo's score in the latter category slipped, proving that any publicity may not, in fact, be good…
From a would-be iPhone 3G buyer in San Francisco:
In theory, Microsoft's license agreement for Vista says you can get a refund from your PC's manufacturer if you buy a model with Vista preinstalled, but replace it with Windows XP, Linux or another operating system. In practice, Equlibriate blogger Kim Kido, a k a uncle_benji, spent two months calling and emailing…
Wall Street's not the only American institution down on Google today. The Better Business Bureau rates the search giant "unsatisfactory." Why? On its record, 2 out of 331 complaints over the past three years were listed as unresolved. And for this, the BBB deems Google "unsatisfactory"? We can just imagine Googlers'…
On the sex worker message board mypinkbook, escorts are working their nerves over some messy moderation on the Craigslist help forums. Like when one woman's ad got flagged for being "a little hookerish." Pot, kettle, black patent pumps, we know. The escort, DameKelly, shares the now-deleted Craigslist moderator…
Dear Valleywag reader Hannah M.: It's true that sometimes Valleywag writes about News Corp.'s social network MySpace. This does not make us MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson, however. We apologize for any confusion. The Internet can be hard. We understand. By way of making up for this grievance, we've posted your…
Ryan Shyzer runs a blog called FacebookTalk.com. It's the seventh result for a Google search on "contact Facebook," and Shyzer gets a lot of emails meant for Facebook customer service. Shyzer, who responds to the emails under the pseudonym "Goob," gets to have a lot more fun than real Facebook customer service. For…
Saying he was screwed out of $56,000, Allen Harkleroad of Web design and development firm GMP Services in Stonesboro, Georgia started website Sprint Sucks. It's an absolutely mesmerizing look into the incredibly energetic businessman's obsession. Harkleroad registered the domain sprint-really-sucks.com on May 12,…
A Comcast customer in Pittsburgh is not amused that Comcast cares. As Twitter user gpk3, he wrote "Comcast sucks," causing Frank Eliason, Comcast's Customer Outreach manager who keeps tabs on Twitter to respond "Welcome to Twitter. How can I change your perception?" The customer was not amused, accusing Comcast of…
Comcast has assigned a customer-service employee to monitor Twitter for the passive-aggressive whines of tech-savvy insiders. A tipster forwards us evidence of the Twitter-stalker in action in the screenshot below. Meanwhile, another sighting of this rare customer-service animal in the wild comes from bilious…
A reader writes in to let us know that while using McAfee's online chat system for customer support, the company representative not only didn't help, but cut off the chat rather than admit they had no idea what they were talking about. I turned up links to just what the customer was looking for — information about a…
