I went to go pay my PG& E bill the other day, you know, to keep the company going while they blow up more things in San Francisco. First thing I do is try and call the phone number on the bill to pay it that way. Instead of having a live operator, which, of course would never happen, or one of those voice mail systems that allow you to punch in numbers, they had a voice activitated system.

I love voice activated systems.

First of all, I'm in my friggin cubicle and I'm now supposed to say out loud things like my checking account number or my address or my phone number or my frickin' social security number. Not to mention the fact that I'm gonna come off sounding like a big ole dork since I'm just going to be saying a bunch of random things.

But the main reason why I hate the voice activated systems is because you have to speak almost perfectly in order for the thing to work. So you find yourself saying things like "billing....billing...bbbbiiiilllliiiiinnngggg" in order to get it through. And forget even trying to say those long numbers that you have as your account number.

So I tried the online site. First thing that I noticed was that somehow I was listed as already being signed up on the online site. Which I think I tried years ago but gave up on when I realized the site didn't work. But for whatever reason, the five passwords that I constantly use never worked with the screen name I always use. So I clicked on the button that said it would send me my password and waited for an e-mail with my password. I got it. They sent my screen name instead.

Naturally, I resigned up with a different name. That worked great except for the fact that everytime I'd type in information and hit "enter," I'd get one of those screens that say "error, try again." And so I did. And it would work until I got to the next screen where I'd type in all my information and hit enter only to be told to try again. I finally made it through, about ten minutes later and entered all my information with excitement in the fact that I had finally paid my bill.

A day later I got a notice saying the payment didn't go through.