Not that this quite belongs here, but I just waded through BellSouth's website, and it really is an "amazing x-ray glasses from Sprint" kind of experience. The pages are horribly poorly written, both in that they require Internet Explorer 5.5 (and are, therefore, Windows only) and that they don't tell you this until you're about 4 pages in of selecting options, possibly more depending on how many services you're getting. The more you'd like to buy, the more you pay, but here not in dollars -- it's a payment in frustration.

There's nothing -- nothing, I can guarantee -- that requires IE 5.5+ here. I could write this site for Netscape 4 and up if they'd like. Would take a month, tops, with the current content.

In any event, then I call up to order my service and find out there's a three-minute wait. I can wait or have them call me back. Three minutes isn't a long time. I'll hold. Five minutes later I'm still holding. I call back, get to go through about 50 seconds of number pushing and confirming, and they'll call me back. They call me back. I answer to a pause. About 7 seconds later, I hear ringing, and then an automated voice. This is my call back, the tape tells me. No reps are ready. I have to hold.

After finding out the $15/mth service advertised is really $26+ with a $42 hookup, I give up. Looks like I'll be adding data services to my cell phone rather than bothering with this crud. Course there the run around could be worse...

What the heck is this mess? I hate monopolies. Please open up the land lines. Why can't anyone service the customer properly?