When I finally found a way to contact Verizon through “email” (really a form to fill out), I typed out my complaint. I have separate internet and telephone accounts; for some reason, the payments I try to make to one account are being applied to the other account, so one account is overdue and the other has credits.
I wrote a detailed email, using quotation marks around the menu items I had clicked, punctuating contractions appropriately, and adding a parenthetical aside or two (that’s just the way I write).
I was surprised to get this message when I tried to send the email:
So, I had to go back through my text, removing the offending “special characters.”
How insulting.
Post was last modified on 3 Mar 2013 10:02 pm
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Dennis, that's an immediate signal that the submission gets parsed by some computer program. All of those "special characters" are unprocessable by SQL, JCL, and other standard text readers. So if you include them in your message, they break the parser :)
My blog uses MySQL, and it handles "mysql> SELECT * FROM mydatabase WHERE name = "Verizon" AND adjective = 'tool';" just fine. It should be a trivial thing to convert those symbols to HTML entities.