*Arrrrrrghhh!!!* (I hate calling Tech. Support!)

Holy crap holy crap holy crap!!!!
 
I'm trying to setup a new email address with my ISP - how difficult can that be???  But it stops me because the display name is already being used.  Really???  Now, there's no reason on Earth why the display name needs to be unique, so I call up to ask why this is a restriction (since I simply want to use my name for more than one business - I'm STILL the same person so I obviously would want the display name to be the same for both).
 
Needless to say, all the call to Tech. Support did was waste over an hour of my time as this person (from who knows what country) takes FOREVER and basically ends up telling me they were able to create the email if they used "test" as the display name.   GEE THANKS!!!!
 
Now is there ANYONE there with even half a brain that I can talk to?  (Answer: No.)
 
I had an additional question about setting up a Sharepoint server but you can be sure that I wasn't about to ask that one to this person!

If you think that's bad try calling Intuit customer support when you have a problem with Quickbooks. I've done it twice, and each time was approximately 2.5 hours being passed from department to department and back again by people who had no idea how the program was actually supposed to work (or how to speak basic conversational English). You know when a baby cries when it's tired and frustrated? Well towards the end of one of the calls I actually started bawling. 
 
Contrast this with Hostgator, which have always given me great customer support. I called them with a technical issue recently and they had me sorted out within 5 minutes and sent me follow up emails. Not one second of confusion, miscommunication or frustration. And a few years ago I discovered that my domain had been compromised and that someone had uploaded the skeletal HTML beginnings of what appeared to be a Russian incest website into a folder (no pics, just the HTML with placeholders). They took that pretty seriously as well and didn't laugh even once. 

Hi,
 
Why aren't you using craig@pigsinfog.com and then you can forward that to anything you want?
 
ISP's are not known for support and haven't been known for it, for 20 years! You're barking at the mirror, and it's not gonna help!

craigb

Moshkiae
Hi,
 
Why aren't you using craig@pigsinfog.com and then you can forward that to anything you want?
 
ISP's are not known for support and haven't been known for it, for 20 years! You're barking at the mirror, and it's not gonna help!

That business will be used when I finally get the time to finish an Android app.  I have a new business that I'm starting where I will be working with a friend out in England.  Different business, different name, different email address (though the Display Name for both should still be allowed to be the same!).
 
(And, yes, I realize that "ISP" stands for "Internet Service Provider" and not "Intelligent Support Provider.")

You can create a domain name for it, and not need the space and such, and you can run email through it. There's a name for that, and it is not on the tip of my tongue right now. And it's cheap. I think it's called parking a domain, or something similar. You can do this at Network Solutions, where you don't have to worry about GoCrappy and others control your destiny. But NetSol has their support all over the world, so be aware of it, but they tend to be more detail oriented and helpful.
 
My domain is iPage, and it has been fine and I have never had issues with them.
 
I did tech support at Pacifier/Millenium for Web Hosting for almost 2 years in the middle of my stint there, and this stuff is not fun, but in the end, there is NOTHING that can't be done, but sometimes you have to get clever with it.

Heh, got an email reply back from Tech Support.  I emailed them to ask why the display name was both a required field AND had to be unique.  Obviously, it doesn't have to be either and, with probably any email client, you can go in, leave it blank or assign the same one to as many email addresses as you like.  They don't seem to understand that I KNOW how to make it unique, but my point is that you shouldn't have to.
 
Their reply (carefully spel-cheked of course):
 

We would like to inform you that an email account's display name is unique because it is specified for the email address it is assigned to. If you wish to use the same display name, which is Crag B, for your email accounts, you can use it but you would add number of spaces in between the name and the letter. An example would be the same as below:

email address 1: Craig_B (The underscore symbol "_" represents the space) email address 2: Craig__B (with 2 spaces) email address 3: Craig___B (with 3 spaces and so on and so forth)

 
 
*Sigh* Not sure why I bother... 

slartabartfast
My understanding is that "display name," i e the friendly name that appears in the From section of the email that is being read by your recipient, is not a part of your ISP's email addressing system like the email address (which must be unique for obvious reasons), but rather a part of the email message itself that your email reader program automatically appends to outgoing mail messages it is sending via a setting in the mail reader program on your computer. Instructions for how to do that should be available for your email program. What email reader are you using?

Your understanding is exactly what mine is, which is why I don't understand why they insist on making it either a required field that's unique.
 
That said, I wonder if I can just make it blank (one space, two spaces, etc.) and ignore it?

I've been on the other end of that telephone conversation, so I have a lot of patience with and sympathy for customer service types. But I've been in your position too, too many times. It's aggravating.
 
But the real problem, as I see it, isn't poor customer service but rather our reliance on software in general and the too-fast pace of software development.
 
When software fails, the phone support person can't do anything about it except file a report. The people who manage software development see bug fixes and usability enhancements as a no-return expense and want to spend 99% of their budget on new development. It's new bells & whistles that sell software, not reliability or ease-of-use.
 
When my wife retired this year, I lost my health insurance through her employer and was mandated by law to buy private health insurance. A government website was created to help me do that. It didn't work. Here in Washington State we had our own software which was touted as a success story but it didn't work for me. It took three MONTHS of daily calls to get through to customer support, and after that they were unable to make one simple change to the database that would have solved my problem. They filed a support ticket and promised to call me back. They never did.
 
I don't blame the customer support people. Clearly, they were understaffed and tasked with "supporting" software that was poorly designed, too complex and hastily slapped together. Why doesn't your ISP let you use any display name you like? Because the software architect didn't think of it and coded an arbitrary rule requiring it to be unique so that it could have an efficient index in the database. Your poor customer service rep knows nothing of this and couldn't do anything about it anyway.