Once more on the curses of Redmond

So I blogged earlier about signing up for Hotmail Plus and what a pain it was to try to get it to work. I ended up setting up a second Yahoo account and, while I had to send batches to get around spamming restrictions (this was not spam. This was legit bulk email), I got what I needed to do done in 45 minutes or so while watching sports.

Now I've gone back to Microsoft to try to get my 20 bux back, and it's like something out of Kafka. It's like dealing with the Federal government. The workflow is bass ackwards inane. Links go to dead pages. It's pathetic. I've had some very bad experiences with Microsoft over the years, but this ranks right up there with the worst of them.