This article at BoingBoing made me laugh. I had almost exactly the same experience with an online tech support person at Earthlink a few weeks ago. I had created an account online, then found that I couldn't use it because they required a type of authentication that my email program couldn't supply, and I only wanted the account temporarily anyway, until I could figure out what I wanted to do about a broken computer.

I wanted to see if I could get a refund for the first month's fee that they had already taken out of my account. It must have taken me a half-hour to get a straight answer. It was infuriating. I don't think they're real people, I think it's computer generated. Either that, or they're having to handle ten online "conversations" at once, which wouldn't surprise me, either.