I recently bought a Sony Ericsson S500i Mobile telephone. Since I was keen to synchronize my address book with the telephone, I tried to install the Sony Ericsson PC-Suite.
It would get about three quarters of the way through the installation and then just hang. I even left it for a couple of hours, in case there was something going on that was very slow. There wasn’t.
After several attempts at installation and several system restores of my Windows XP PC, I was getting somewhat frustrated.
Eventually I found the solution. The readme file for the PC-Suite states that Internet Explorer must be installed. This is actually an understatement. It requires Internet Explorer to be set as the default browser, certainly during installation.
It amazes me that:

1. the combination of Sony and Ericsson are incapable of writing standalone software that does note require Internet Explorer for installation
2. The software that they write is sufficiently untested that it just hangs
3. The PC-Suite installation fails to report a requirement or its own error

I recently received an email from netsource.co.uk. It started :

Dear Sir/Madam
Please excuse me if this has reached you by mistake but i am contacting you by email as we have no other valid contact details.

Now, the “Dear sir or Madam” opening always flags to me that the agency is too lazy to even do enough work to mail merge my name in from their database, so have probably decide to spam all the people on their database with any posts that match any key word, rather than checking CVs.

The first sentence corroborates this view and shows that the author can’t even use a spell checker.

Since my mobile phone number and my postal address both pre-date the email address that they used and appear on the same CV, it seem that they have started the contact with a lie or have a competence issue with their data entry staff. In either case, I feel that they are unlikely to be good professional representatives for my skills.

It also occurs to me that if they just do a bit of text matching on the CVs in their file without reviewing them, for a post, they are essentially using spam to delegate the work to their customers while still taking full commissions.

When I pointed out this agency’s deficiencies, CP replied, “The last time out records where update for you was in 2002 that is why we have an old email address.“, demonstrating that she could not even read or understand the content of my email which explained that, there was no error in the email address used, just that they falsely claimed that they have no other contact details.

What do you think? Should I just blacklist the company on any of these grounds?