Facebook's latest "customer service" FAIL

[TygrBright]

Seriously, I think these oscos have a highly-paid staff of geniuses (genii?) whose job is to sit around and think up new ways to PISS PEOPLE OFF.

I use Facebook under protest. I need to administer some pages for various clients. So I was dragged, kicking and screaming, into setting up an account.

Some family and friends found out, "friended" me, I didn't want to be rude so I "friended" back, and am now accustomed and moderately reconciled to having a slow but useful feed of stuff from this small group. I have my privacy settings selected so that (hopefully) no one else is aware of my existence, which is how I like it.

Now the customer torment imps at Facebook have "improved" my account by assigning me a new "username" instead of the string-of-numbers UID that used to be my account identification. And that "username" is my full, legal, real name which is not exactly Mary Smith. It's pretty easy to associate with me and no one else except someone who died in the 1990s. (I Googled it.)

I will allow as how, at some point in the dim misty future, I might be slightly less paranoid about my privacy, and actually WANT half a billion people on the Internet to be able to find my Facebook account and send me Facebook emails. It's unlikely, but possible. It might even be economically necessary at some point. So, having the choice of putting my actual name out there as my Facebook username should be an available option for me.

But it's NOT AN OPTION I WANT NOW.

And therein lies the crux.

They will not allow me to switch my username back to the string of numbers that is my UID.

And they tell me that if I select a random string of characters to change my username to, that it's the "ONE TIME" change, the only one I will ever be allowed, period, and I'll never be able to actually change again, and use my actual name, should that become what I want.

And when I look for ways to politely petition them to revoke or undo this act of misguided "kindness" on their part, I get the usual "We get job satisfaction from making people swear and throw their keyboards at the screen" runaround, as in, there IS no way to actually communicate with them, other than by clicking radio buttons that bear no relationship to what I need.

Gosh.

Thanks.

I have no idea why the voice of Lily Tomlin as "Ernestine" the phone company operator is ringing in my ears right now.

My only comfort is imagining just exactly what Karma might eventually catch up with them.

irritatedly,
Bright

[OriginalGeek]

1. The only thing I can think of to do

is to kill that account and set up a brand new one.

I have more than one FB account because I use for one games and I don't want a million game messages polluting my regular account. But I could make more if I wanted.

Since you say you have a small group of friends on the original it might not be so bad to recreate it with a new user name.

I think there are one or two hoops through which you must jump to get an active account deleted permanently but once jumped, you shouldn't have to deal with that again.

[AmyDeLune]

2. My favorite Facebook "upgrade" quote from my brother-

"Facebook! Stop trying to improve my life!"