While Ben continues to burst aneurysms out of his skin like tiny out-of-control fire hoses in his efforts to cancel his MySpace account, here’s a reminder that impenetrably convoluted instructions to get support aren’t limited to community websites aimed primarily at Popken and his sulky teenage emo girl peer group.

Via This Is Broken, this is apparently what it takes to send an email to HP’s email support system:

1. Fill out the HP support web form. This won’t work, but it’s the unnecessary first step that gives all resulting unnecessary steps their unnecessary necessity.

2. We told you: your submission will not be an accepted. But the email rejection you get will tell you to write them back!

3. Unfortunately, you can’t just reply back to the address you just received an email from. Scour the email trying to find the place where they mention the correct email address to reply to.

4. You’re not done yet! Now similarly change the subject.

5. Finally, delete all the lines in the email rejection you got except the two lines with your case ID and subject on it. Make these the first two lines of your reply.

6. Press send!

If you’re lucky, your email will now rocket through cyberspace and fulfill all the arbitrary requirements necessary for HP to help you fix the crummy broken computer they sold you. But the smallest typo, an extra carriage return will send your email hurtling back out of the system, like a space shuttle overestimating the angle of approach and bouncing off the ozone at a thousand miles per hour.

Meanwhile, the rest of us wonder why, if the form doesn’t work, why HP doesn’t just send you exactly the form you need to send back to get some help.

Software support process at HP [This is Broken]

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