Lounge rage

This was written last night on my laptop. I haven't re-read it since I wrote it and am just going to paste it in as-is, typos 'n all.

AAAAAARRRGH I'M SO ANGRY RIGHT NOW. It's sad, I know, but the reason I'm so fucking angry is because of my home ISP, PlusNet. See I've been trying to get online for way too long in this lounge in Heathrow Terminal 4 rather than sitting back and just enjoying the ambience, and I've failed. So now I'm going to get a(nother) beer and come back to write the rest of this fucking rant.

Ooh, London Pride out of a can, interesting.

So, PlusNet. See these BA lounges are wireless hotspots so it should be a breeze to get online for a bit, but I don't have an account with anyone. When the BT OpenZone page comes up and asks me who my account is with, though, I saw PlusNet in the list. Well that's who I've been paying (way too much) for my ADSL at home so I thought, wahey, this should be simple -- they can just shove whatever the costs are on my existing direct debit. Schweet.

OH THAT IT WOULD BE THAT SIMPLE.

Their poxy fucking sign-up website is a heap of total fucking shit. For a company whose entire business is, broadly, "the internet", you'd think they'd be able to write a simple fucking 3-stage site that lets new punters create an account and existing ones buy a bit of wireless credit. But fucking no, they can't. I got lost in a maze of never-ending redirects to pages I'd already seen, confounded by fully-filled-in forms (even the optional fields!) that claimed to be missing vital/required information, and just generally frustrated as FUCK. I use a Mac, which I figured was the cause of all the trouble -- lots of companies employ people to make websites who think there's only one type of computer and one type of browser out there -- and thought I'd hit paydirt when finally I flicked on Opera and managed to get it to work out who I was, from my existing ADSL account info, *and* accept my credit card number for 120 minutes of access. I got to a page called "ThankYou.html" which contained a Thank You message and some instructions on how to connect.

I followed those instructions and it doesn't know who I am and wants me to create a new account. Only now even Opera doesn't have a fuckign clue who I am. All in all I wasted about, I dunno, 40 minutes on this shit? Just so I could get online and check the Man Utd score, read my emails, just generally do a bit of meaningless browsing. Really I should have been enjoying everything this lounge has to offer, after all I've bloody paid for this holiday and should be larging it. I know it's only day 2, flight 3, but I feel like I've been an idiot already :-(

Don't get me wrong; before trying this I did have a couple of sandwiches, a bagel, and a can of lager, but that's hardly taking advantage. There's spa treatment available here, massages 'n shit. There's hot food and waiter service (I think) and spirits and wines (bleurgh) and here's me trying to get on the poxy Internet. I could even have just sat and read a book. For fucks sake, the number of people I've told that this holiday isn't entirely, or even mainly, about where I'm going, but about what I'm getting away from, and the strange kind of freedom the captivity of airports and aeroplanes and being outside of your home timezone gives you and here's me trying to log the fuck on, as if it's something I don't already spend most of my waking life doing.

Great. Now I'm fucking angry at myself as well as PlusNet. Blog entry over.