Microsoft Sucks!

Are you sick and tired of my ranting and raving about things I can't change?  Are you a member of the Microsoft fan club?  If either of these apply, read no further.

The Back Story
Once upon a time, my brother, Pat, and I, could exchange emails.  That ended several years ago when I received a 'failed' message from 'Postmaster', with an attachment that contained 7 lines of information, all meaningless to me, last 3 words: 'Blacklisted by user.'  I published a post (Blacklisted; 6/28/12) about this, explained what happened, asked if anyone else had this problem, and if so, what did they do about it?  One person commented that he had a similar problem, but had no useful advice to offer.

Who was the 'user' that did the blacklisting?  Pat and I are users but we didn't do it.  We're safe senders/receivers on our computers.  So, it had to be the ISP or some another entity in the electronic chain twixt sender and receiver.  Pat checked with his ISP and was told that it had to be fixed at my end.  I sent Pat an email from my computer, using a gmail address instead of the msn address I usually use.  It went through okay, which meant that the computers were okay and so were the ISPs.  And, that meant the culprit is msn, aka hotmail, aka Microsoft.

Microsoft
I called their help number, recording said go online.  Did online chat with Ken, sent him the error message and after several minutes of asinine questions, he admitted the problem was beyond his scope (no shit?), gave me a different phone number to call.  I called, got the same recording as before, was directed to the same website as before.

I tried online chat again with Tania, another so-called tech.  SOS: beyond her scope, etc.  She directed me to a website which got me right back to the same damned help screen as the first 2 directives.

Thinking 'third time's the charm', I tried online chat yet again.  SOS.  Again.  Was advised to complete a form with the help of my ISP and submit it to Microsoft when completed.  I was seriously tempted to tell her where to stick her freakin' form but did not.  Remarkable self control!

For each online chat I was offered a choice of 3 pictured techs with star ratings.  I picked the highest rated one each time but never got the one I picked - nor any of the others that were pictured and highly rated.  Bait and switch: pick the A-team, get a bench warmer.  Microsoft's message to customers is loud and clear: We dominate the software market so why should we care about customer satisfaction?  Piss off!

Venting
They emailed a customer satisfaction survey to me.  Oh boy!  Gonna have great fun filling out that sucker!  They'll immediately clean up their act, don't ya think?  Right.  And, I'm the king of Denmark.