If you want to see something that will leave you shaking your head in disbelief, take a look at straighttalkwirelessforum.com.

* Every single customer issue receives (at some point in time) a response from a moderator saying, "We need to take this issue offline. I'll PM you." No issues get solved with any transparency.

* People can't respond to PMs until they've posted 5 messages on the message boards, ostensibly to prevent spam. So instead 4/5ths of the message board posts are spam by users trying to get their private messaging enabled.

* Many people (myself included) seem to have a second layer of anti-spam protection on their PMs, so any sent messages just sit in the outbox...which leads people to again turn to the message boards and tell moderators that there's a response intended for the moderator sitting in the user's out box.

* And moderators must get paid per posting, because some days (like today), you'll see that a moderator has randomly gone through old posts (in this case, from July) that never received a moderator response and are posting a stream of, "Are you still having problems? If so, I'll PM you," messages to people who have probably slit their wrists, jumped out the window or fled to another wireless provider in the intervening four months.

And this is what passes for ST customer support.