Since my car insurance is due for renewal shortly I decided to use the super smart confused.com website to generate a collection of quotes. According to their advert it only takes a minute, and since I used them last year in theory it should've just been a case of telling them I've moved and getting a new set of quotes. But then I'm stupid.

Despite the fact that they struggle to identify any of the common job titles I offer for my daily time-wasting I persevered. After an hour where neither myself (in their database as a computer engineer) or Cathy (Comp. Sci student) being able to get their website to actually generate anything useful I sent them an email. I thought I'd remove the address so you folks can enjoy this copy.

Hello,

I am trying to generate a quote for my car insurance.  Regardless of
whether I try to create a new quote or try to amend an existing quote I
am unable to edit the post code at which I live.  I am able to change
the road, town, county, and I can highlight the text inside post code
boxes, however it does not allow me to type anything in or delete the
current post code.

This is true for Internet Explorer 6 (service pack 2), IE7 Beta (most
recent build) and any of the Mozilla based browsers I tested.

Since you allow me to say my car is kept at my actual address I find
myself ineligible for insurance from many companies because you tell
them my car is kept 150 miles away from my home.  This despite the fact
that the address you have matches the post code where my car is kept
even though you forbid me from using my correct post code for my
residence.

Also, the address field does not allow me to enter my address in an
accurate manner.  According to Royal Mail my address is:

Flat Number
Building
Street Address
City
Postcode

Your address fields do not allow this type of address to be entered.
The best I can conclude is $foo for the number, and $bar for the
road, and then fill in the full address in the supplementary lines you
provide.  I am sure this means the quotes generated are inaccurate.

Further more, my girlfriend tried generating a quote in her name.  As a
new customer you allowed her to enter our actual post code which led to
much rejoicing.  Unfortunately after spending much more than your
advertised minute to enter all the data she was also unable to see any
quotes because when you asked for her to enter a password etc. your site
constantly complained that she must include a password reminder and that
it should be less than 30 characters.  This would make sense if she left
the password reminder field blank or included a reminder over 30
characters however she most definitely entered data in this field and it
was certainly under 30 characters.

Since I am apparently unable to use my current account to generate my
quote, and your policy seems to forbid me creating a new account I would
be extremely grateful if you could assist me in using your service.

As a side note I find your policy that passwords cannot contain numbers
to be disgraceful - basic computer security suggests that limiting
passwords to 26 characters (especially with your strict guidelines of a
6 character minimum and 8 character maximum) will always result in weak
passwords.  Password reminders are also far more effective if you allow
a reasonable field length, 30 characters can be used up very quickly if
your customers wish to use long words.

Yours Confusedly,
Kevin Golding

I'm still not sure how I got past suggesting their customers might use long words without adding"like cat, or fish" but I did, I am proud of myself for it too. Now, I wonder how long before I get a dopey form reply telling me that they only support IE6 and I should run anti-virus software to solve world hunger.