Cingular must be hiring high school kids to do their web site, because it seems to be about as robust as Michael Jackson's defense.

Every time I try to log in to their web site, I have to try three times, because the first two inevitably fail with an error saying "our site it having trouble accessing your records, try again in a few minutes".

Today, I went it to verify my list of features to make sure the "Roadside Assistance" plan is outta there. I managed to check the first two lines, but when I check the third and fourth, I'm getting a rather unfriendly and unprofessional null pointer exception from their web site:

Error 500--Internal Server Error

java.lang.NullPointerException at com.cingular.olam.webcomponent.servlets.AddFeaturesToCurrentPPWA.service (AddFeaturesToCurrentPPWA.java:284) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:853) at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl$ServletInvocationAction.run(ServletStubImpl.java:971) at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl.invokeServlet(ServletStubImpl.java:402) at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl.invokeServlet(ServletStubImpl.java:305) at weblogic.servlet.internal.RequestDispatcherImpl.forward(RequestDispatcherImpl.java:301) at com.cingular.olam.webcomponent.servlets.DispatcherServlet.ForwardToPage(DispatcherServlet.java:58) at com.cingular.olam.webcomponent.servlets.DispatcherServlet.service(DispatcherServlet.java:30) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:853) at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl$ServletInvocationAction.run(ServletStubImpl.java:971) at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl.invokeServlet(ServletStubImpl.java:402) at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl.invokeServlet(ServletStubImpl.java:305) at weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppServletContext$ServletInvocationAction.run (WebAppServletContext.java:6350) at weblogic.security.acl.internal.AuthenticatedSubject.doAs(AuthenticatedSubject.java:317) at weblogic.security.service.SecurityManager.runAs(SecurityManager.java:118) at weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppServletContext.invokeServlet(WebAppServletContext.java:3635) at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletRequestImpl.execute(ServletRequestImpl.java:2585) at weblogic.kernel.ExecuteThread.execute(ExecuteThread.java:197) at weblogic.kernel.ExecuteThread.run(ExecuteThread.java:170)

Any web doofus should know that you NEVER expose Java errors and tracebacks directly to end users. Java supports exception handling, but these guys must not know that. Wouldn't it be fun if this traceback included information that hackers could use to break in?

So much for being a "technology company".

I've had a cellular phone with AT&T Wireless Services for 7 or 8 years. Our small company was buying its minutes through a minutes reseller (Comprehensive Solutions, Inc., formerly of Oregon City, Oregon, now apparently in Aloha). That resulted in a reasonably low monthly cost, but the extra layer of non-responsive bureaucracy meant that, for instance, I couldn't transfer my phone number to another carrier. This was not helped by CSI's apparent corporate policy of not answering the phone, responding to answering machine messages, nor replying to e-mail.

Meanwhile, my wife also had an AT&T Wireless Services cell phone on a "family" plan with her monther and our daughter. We've wanted to transfer my phone to the "family plan", but couldn't get the reseller to respond.

Thanks to a major screw-up on the part of the reseller, I was finally forced to take some action in February. All I wanted to do was buy a new phone and add it to my wife's plan. Turns out that is impossible. All of our phones were CDMA, and you can't buy a CDMA phone today. Further, you can't add a GSM phone to a CDMA phone plan. That means, for me to get a phone, we have to replace the three other phones in the plan.

FURTHER, to stay with AT&T, we would give up any right to the phone hardware subsidies that make the phones affordable. Strangely, however, if we transferred to Cingular, we COULD get the phone subsidies, even though AT&T and Cingular are now the same company.

So, that's what we did. We transferred from the comfort of AT&T to the unknown land of Cingular, with 4 new phones. During the sign-up period, the representative at Good Guys told us there was a promotional offer for two free months of their "Roadside Assistance" coverage, which would start costing $3 a month in the third month. I didn't want that, but he said there was NO WAY FOR THE RETAILER TO DISABLE IT. That's a bad sign.

We've had the phones for a month now, so I decided to go to their website and cancel the roadside assistance. Here, I find one of the most annoying things you can find on a commercial website: they have a brightly-lit website where you can ADD services, but there is absolutely no spot for REMOVING services. You have to call their customer service number.

That is incredibly irritating. You can almost hear the marketing grunts in their meeting: "if we make it hard for people to remove services, maybe they'll probably just give up and we can keep on taking their money!" That kind of thinking implies that I am too st00pid to figure out how to use the telephone.

Get a clue, Cingular. If you are going to allow me to manage my account online, then you need to allow me to MANAGE my account online. There's no way I'm going to experiment with new services if there is no easy way for me to remove them later.