Y'wanna know why Friendster sucks? Because they don't have a customer service e-mail address. Oh, no, that'd be too much work for them! Instead you have to sift through their 13 pages of FAQs and hope that one of them addresses your issue -- which, by the way, has never been the case for me!

I hate Friendster!

So, here's the scoop:

When I used to have a Friendster account, I also had a blog, and since I wanted to be able to format my blog and do some reasonably cool stuff, I had a blog for which I paid $8.95/mo. When I followed the online process to cancel my account, I tho't that would also cancel my blog.

I tho't wrongly.

Turns out the blog aspect of the whole Friendster thing is actually run by a company called Six Apart Ltd. (SAL). For some reason, you have to contact them separately to cancel your blog.

I wrote to Friendster's suggestions e-mail address ('cause, as I already said, they don't have a customer service one) saying they should probably let customers know this at some point during the whole canceling-the-account process. Friendster's suggestions team wrote back saying, yeah, y'know what, you're right! We probably should! Weird that we don't. Huh. Head-scratcher, that!

So I went to SAL's site to ask them to stop charging me for my Friendster blog, as the account had been canceled.

A couple of months went by, and I saw that I was still being charged $8.95 every month by SAL. I finally had enough and contacted my bank to dispute the most current charge and any future charges. As a result, my debit card has been canceled and my bank is issuing me a new one, which means that, for the time being, I HAVE to either write checks or carry cash; otherwise I can't buy anything.

Convenient, no?

HELL NO!

And to top it all off, SAL is insisting that the account still exists, and therefore the blog still exists. I went around and around with them, saying, look, if you Google my site, it comes up with a, "No, it ain't there!" screen. IT DOES NOT EXIST!

SAL responded, well, sure, the blog itself doesn't exist, but the corresponding photo pages still exist, so we therefore get to keep charging you. If you want us to stop, you have to go back and cancel your Friendster account using their online process.

Anyone else beating their head against the wall yet? Damn!

So I went back and contacted Friendster -- which, if you'll recall, does not have a customer service e-mail address; I keep having to contact them through their suggestions e-mail address -- and explained the issue. I got a formulaic response saying that the suggestions department doesn't handle these kinds of questions, and I needed to go back and contact customer service.

And, yes, say it with me now, there is no customer service e-mail address to contact!!!

*sigh*

I seriously could cry.