Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

In an attempt to get some­thing done today, I am post­ing here.

I’ve been loaf­ing about in over-sized pyja­mas and mat­ted hair all day because my nerves are bad and when my nerves are bad it feels like an army of Smurfs are mer­rily build­ing a city of little toad­stool houses inside my chest cav­ity; leav­ing no room for my internal organs. Ergo, Smurfs are bad. The Smurfs went on a tea break for a while, then the Diazepam wore off and now they’re ham­mer­ing away at their new three-storey shop­ping com­plex with under-street park­ing facil­it­ies for their little Smurf cars. The little blue bas­tards with their white shoes and trousers all built-in!

I feel I’ve got­ten off the beaten track.

In other news, I (think) my deal­ings with the old shit host are over… I think.

The only con­tact email address they pub­lish is: sup­port@oldshithost.com

Bear in mind at this junc­ture that this is the very email address that boasts 24/7 sup­port responses but takes on aver­age 14+ hours to reply with a load of old pony. I digress, I emailed them with all the rel­ev­ant details and said that I wished to can­cel the account. An hour or so later, I get this:

Hello Claire,

Thank you for con­tact­ing [Old Shit Host] Tech­nical Support!

In order to com­plete your request please con­tact our billing depart­ment at the accounts@oldshithost.com or call [“toll free” num­ber, which is not free if dialled from the UK] option 3 and they will assist you gladly. If you require fur­ther assist­ance, please do not hes­it­ate to con­tact us and we will be glad to assist you further.

We are avail­able 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for addi­tional assist­ance, and invite you to con­tact us if you have any addi­tional concerns.

Ok fair enough, I opt not to use the inter­na­tional num­ber and resend my wish to can­cel to the inbox of accounts@oldshithost.com.

The response:

Hello:

To can­cel your account, you need to send an e-mail to can­cel@oldshithost.com and provide the fol­low­ing information:

1– Domain name
2– Account pass­word and the last 4 digits of the credit card on file for authen­tic­a­tion pur­poses.
3– Reason for cancellation.

Once received, your account will be can­celed and the con­firm­a­tion will be sent back to you. If you did not receive our con­firm­a­tion, please con­tact us again as we might not received your e-mail.

Oh, for cry­ing out loud — can’t they just FW: the bloody thing on?

Third time lucky, per­haps? Ham­mer off yet another email, this time to “can­cel” because appar­ently “sup­port” was the wrong guy and “accounts” just wasn’t close enough (Jesus wept…) That’s before even address­ing the dodgy “your account will be can­celed and the con­firm­a­tion will be sent back to you. If you did not receive our con­firm­a­tion, please con­tact us again as we might not received your e-mail.” bit.

Slightly iffy…

A couple of hours later, I get a LOL-Cat cap­tion mas­quer­ad­ing as formal con­firm­a­tion of the ter­min­a­tion of my account:

Hello Claire,

Regard­ing your webac­count, please be advised that has been can­celled your
host­ing ser­vices.
If you have any ques­tions or con­cerns, please don’t hes­it­ate to con­tact us.

Thank you,

cancel@oldshithost.com

http://www.oldshithost.com

[totally dif­fer­ent toll-free num­ber to the one given originally]

And they want us to think they haven’t out-sourced their tech sup­port to the armpit of the devel­op­ing world? With that gram­mar? It doesn’t even bloody make sense!

Here’s the best bit: just out of curi­os­ity I vis­ited my old URLs whilst writ­ing this — not only everything is still just how I left it, but I can even still log in to my old con­trol panel.

I can see this is going to be a good’un…