Big corporations are scared of you...

Maybe not, perhaps they're just shy. But Sony certainly are not encouraging any direct contact with their gazillions of customers. I have wasted an entire afternoon trying to connect a Sony digital Handycam to my laptop so that I can copy the contents of a tape via USB. Should be pretty easy, but no, looks like it cannot be done (see this interesting forum to read comments from a few hundred other frustrated people http://forum.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/8691/56322.html ).

So, I decide to quit wasting my time, and to seek help from the manufacturers, who, you might imagine, would be more than willing to bend over backwards to help out a customer. Egads. I go to their website, I search for the product, I search the FAQs and get no answer, I try to initiate a Live Chat session but it does not work (reason: 'daytime off', whatever that means), and finally I fill in an online form that fails to send. I fill it in again, and once more it fails to send. A complete dead end, thank you Mr Sony. You have hidden your faceless corporation pretty well behind several non-functioning 'facilities'.

I try a different tack, by looking for a local / regional support site. I find it, but once again it makes it impossible to get even an email address for a real person. The 'contact us' link just puts you back into the same loop of filling in a stupid form that will not send - their support department must think they are doing a great job, because they never get any complaining emails.

I am so frustrated because I have not even been offered the opportunity of waiting in line for a millennium or two and then speaking to some script-reading nerd at a call centre, and after wasting 2 hours scouring the web for information on this product I am absolutely none the wiser. Gaaaaargh!