I admit it. I'm addicted to World of Warcraft. I'm able to stop playing for a month at a time, apparently, but something akin to Foxtrot's Jason, every couple of months the addiction's back.

Anyhow, in "WoW", you run a series of quests which build storylines for your character. Say some proverbial maiden has lost her locket and needs you to battle ogres to retrieve it -- you talk to her, 'get' the quest, and off you go. When you bring the locket back, she's supposed to give you some sort of reward, your character gets more 'experience points' making you better at fighting ogres & the like, and off you go to find another quest. Simple stuff. Very King Arthur, I'll admit.

What I don't like is when the computer rears its ugly head. Let's pretend I brought back the locket, the maiden took it, and I got zilch. In fact, the maiden acts like she still hasn't gotten anything. And it took me hours to get the blamed locket. I want my reward, yo. It's a bug in the WoW code, so I email support.

Here's their less than impressive response (skip to see end of vent):
Hello,

Thank you for contacting the World of Warcraft Game Master Department.

In order to solve your current quest issue we ask that you do the following:

-Abandon the quest from the quest log
-Move all quest items to the main backpack
-Return to the NPC that gave you the quest (If it is a series, the last NPC you interacted with)
-Acquire the quest again
-If the "error duplicate item appears" then please destroy any quest items.

If the same issue occurs a second time, please petition for a Game Master detailing the events. We thank you for your patience.

That's right. Blizzard, the company that makes WoW, wants me to go throw away those hours again and see if I can make the bug reoccur. Oh that's fun. It's like telling Luke Skywalker, "Luke, I know you fired the missile into the Death Star and it blew up, but for some reason we missed it. Can you go back?" (I know that I'm also periliously close to sounding like Luke "The Crybaby" in Thumb Wars, but we'll skip that for now. Hours of my life wasted, I'm telling you! As opposed to all those spent collecting virtual rewards from virtual lockets given to automatons controlled by huge Windows servers... no waste there)

Are you kidding me? You thank me for my patience? You mean you thank me for shelling out $10 a month to bug test your danged game! My goodness, where the heck do I find users like that? Looks like I've been in the wrong biz all this time.