It evokes a sense of middle-school déja vu. In those lost years, if a guy liked you, he must not be worth having so you snubbed him even if it meant sitting out the eighth grade dance and watching him dance with your biggest rival. Could it be that some business people have yet to rid themselves of this self-defeating attitude when dealing with customers? Some of my recent purchases would lead me to believe so.

“I’m hiding this bath mat. Go out and get a new one.” My husband issued this ultimatum not because the bath mat was grungy or aesthetically repugnant but because it was my late mother’s bath mat — the one she slipped on and broke her hip. This chartreuse and lime monster now resided in my bathroom where it could easily dispatch another generation of hips.

Admitting that my husband had a legitimate concern, I spent a recent lunch hour looking for a bath mat with the right color and texture — and, of course, rubber backing. While I was wondering around in the bath department at Linens N Things, an elderly man approached me. I was wearing my ID tag from work, so he mistook me for a store employee. He said he was looking for an embroidered shower curtain. Coincidentally, I had just bought such an item at Bed, Bath and Beyond a few days before. I helped him look for one at LNT but couldn’t find one, so I told him about Bed, Bath and Beyond. He told me that he had called that BB and B yesterday and the person who answered the phone told him they had never carried such a thing.

At thirty bucks a pop, embroidered shower curtains likely carry a healthy markup. So why the missed opportunity to make a sale AND to help an elderly widower who was having a difficult time shopping with his wife gone? I explained to the man that BB and B did indeed carry such a product and that it came in two colors. I gave the man directions to BB and B and told him exactly where the embroidered shower curtains were located in the store, sending him on his way with best wishes. I hope that he got better service in person than he did over the phone.

The lack of respect shown for this customer resembled the treatment I had received recently from Names4ever.com. I was trying to register a domain name for a client. Since I will be managing the domain for this client, I wanted the registration to reflect the same billing and contact information as my own domain registration. However, when I tried to register the domain name by initiating a domain name search and confirming that I wanted to register the domain, the login screen required my assigned client number and password. When I input this information, the system didn’t recognize my login.

I thought it might be easier to log in first then register the new domain. The login screen accepted my domain name and password and displayed my account screen, where I selected the “Register Domain Name” option. Here, I was prompted to enter more information than I thought was necessary for an existing customer, but I complied because I wanted to get this task behind me. When I clicked the final submit/confirm button, I received an error message whining that I was not a reseller and therefore could not register a domain name.

Their logic didn’t make sense, so I sent an e-mail to the Names4ever sales department, but ten days later, I am still waiting for a response. I bypassed technical support because the last time I asked a question, they took two days to respond and gave me the wrong answer.  My problem at that juncture had been that I was trying to enter into my account the DNS information for my web hosting service. I got to the right screen and entered the information, but kept getting the same meaningless error message. I finally figured out that one must delete the default DNS server information before entering the same information for your new host. Nowhere does the screen or FAC address this issue. So what did the long-awaited customer support e-mail tell me to do? The same procedure that drew the error message to begin with, with no mention of deleting the existing DNS info. Evidently the correct procedure is such a well-kept secret that even Customer Support doesn’t know about it.

I can understand why Names4Ever didn’t spend time making this procedure friendly. Names4Ever as part as Aplus Net, wants registrants to use Aplus Net’s hosting service. Thus, they might consider it good business practice to make it difficult for businesses hook their domain name up with a different hosting service.

But why would they want to make it difficult for existing customers to register an additional domain name? If I were registering a hundred names with an eye to reselling them at exorbitant prices (in other words, cyber squatting) I could understand the resistance. But many businesses register four or five domain names for their own use and many services make this process simple enough to accomplish.

On the HomePage front, at the recommendation of a systems engineer who worked with me, I initially selected NetFirms.com as my hosting provider. However, heeding the admonition of Lynn Northrup, who teaches some excellent Online Business courses for the Northside School District Continuing Education Program, I printed and carefully read the service agreement before making a final confirmation. In that service agreement, I found cause for concern.

My daughter had already set up a free personal site at NetFirms and almost immediately ran into a technical issue that was difficult to resolve. Because of NetFirms’ banner-ad-on-every-page policy, she was unable to define her site using frames. She ended up redesigning the website with a cascading style sheet to accommodate this issue, but it made the website a little more difficult to implement than we would have liked.

Therefore, when I read the service agreement for a paid hosting service, I was dismayed to see the banner-ad-on-every-page clause with no stipulation that this was only for free hosting plans. I e-mailed NetFirms to question this stipulation, but it was at least 24 hours before I got an answer.

NetFirms’ attitude, sour as it is, is much sweeter than that shown me by the people who sold me my $279 cat litter box. After receiving a multitude of rewards and endorsements for their push-button self-washing litter box, the litterfree.com people appeared to be marketing the next must-have home appliance. Getting the specialized litter and cleaning solution shouldn’t be a problem because you could order the products on their website. A nicely designed and presented site, Litterfree.com had just one problem: the CGI scripts that ran their order forms didn’t work. Therefore, you would fill out several pages of forms for ordering supplies and get nothing but a CGI Script Error for your efforts. CGI Script Errors can occur when the hosting provider doesn’t support CGI and/or when the webmaster fails to include the proper scripts in the site files. I tried to e-mail the company about the problem; however, the contact e-mail link was also embedded in a CGI script, meaning that it didn’t work either. So concerned was I at the prospect of a good company being taken down by a badly implemented website, I got their snail mail address and sent them a letter detailing the problem. Sadly, the letter came back with an “addressee unknown” stamp a couple of weeks later.

Meanwhile, back at the domain, while waiting to hear from NetFirms, I logged into webhostingratings.com. Here, entered my criteria for monthly hosting fee, disk space and transfer limits, and sorted by number of feedback responses received. I found that ICDSoft.com led the ratings pack, so, after a little more research, I selected them. Although ICDSoft is located in Hong Kong, I have not been sorry. The user interface is so simple to use that I was able to walk a client through the process of setting up e-mail accounts in less than half an hour with plenty of time for idle chat.

My relationship with ICDSoft has not been trouble-free. When registering another client’s domain and initiating a hosting service, I again had a problem getting my login recognized. (I may have senior moments, but I am diligent about keeping track of my accounts and passwords and careful with capitalization and numbers.)  I e-mailed their customer service department and miraculously heard back from them within twenty minutes. They even gave me some helpful suggestions: enable cookies and remove temporary Internet files from my system. I did this and was able to log in even from my husband’s fortress of a computer. I encountered a couple more issues before I got all my ducks in a row, but ICDSoft customer support stayed with me until I got my registration and signup finished, and even responded to my “thank you” note.

I praise ICDSoft, but don’t find their fealty overly noble. Working to bring in new business is simply good business practice. However, their diligence looks like the exception rather than the rule. When Americans lament that too many companies are taking their business overseas I can only cite the fact that when I try to do business with companies on this side of the ocean, no-one is at home.

Now that I have bashed one Canadian company (NetFirms) and three American Companies (Names4ever, Litterfree, Bed Bath and Beyond) I should give some praise to another American company. When I secured a five-year domain registration for my latest client, I used my L. L. Bean card to pay for the transaction. I was printing the receipt at about 9 PM (less than five minutes after I submitted the transaction) when I got a phone call. MBNA, the financial institution that offers the L. L. Bean card, was checking to make sure I had indeed initiated a financial transaction over the Internet. The young man that called got a resounding thanks for his diligence. It’s nice to know someone is paying attention, especially when it comes to my money.