My career at Microsoft

I was watching this video which included an interview with Dave Plumber who is an ex-Microsoft-dev like myself who worked on much of the same stuff as I did and his stories bring back fond and not-so-fond memories of my 20 years as a developer at Microsoft.

How I got into Microsoft:

My father lost all his money about the time I graduated High School and at that time I got a soldering job with a company called Processor Technology which invented an S100 bus based 8080 system known as the SOL.

The company was starting in a garage about 2 blocks from my home in Livermore California.  That was an amazing stroke of luck to be there - at about the same time as Apple Computer was also in a garage.

The two companies were in fierce competition and somebody got the idea to buy up all of a very common but very necessary chip that forced Processor Technology (PT) quickly out of business.

Before they died, however, I joined the US Navy and as I was going to schools to prepare myself to become a Nuc on a submarine, I asked my old boss if I could buy a kit for a SOL.  After saving up for a few months it was delivered to my A school in Chicago where I put it together (soldering was necessary as well as assembly) and, after finding it not working, I sent it back to PT to fix it. I was learning to program it in Basic and 8080 Assembly Language from then till entering Microsoft.

Later, when I got to the Submarine, I would, on long runs, bring it and play with it while underwater.  This got me very good at 8080 assembly language which I would code up on a pad of paper while standing a boring watch in the nuc plant. (This was not allowed, but boredom has its motivations).  Thus, in time, I had most of 8080 assembly language memorized and knew the processor intimately.

When I got out of the Navy, I went college, now that I had the GI Bill to make it possible, and proceeded to ace all but 2 classes and graduated with honors.

That was when Steve Wood, one of the coders of the DOS Kernel was recruiting devs for Microsoft.  He and I hit it off well and he arranged for me to go to Redmond for an interview.

I was hired after a long day of trying to impress some of the smartest people I have ever met and became employee #1000 at Microsoft in September of  1986.

My early days at Microsoft:

I did too well in my interviews.  I got married soon after the interview but before starting at Microsoft and wanted to do a honeymoon in Europe over the summer of 1986 and asked Microsoft if I could wait to start till September and they said, and I quote "Sure, we're not proud".

The day I started was the stock market crash of 1986 and at first I thought this was a horrible thing - the stock was crashing, but then I found out that my stock options were entered on that same day.  I had better options than people that had been there for over 5 years!

I was immediately put into the "Presentation Manager" group for OS/2 which is the code that does all the core window management and UI for the OS.  This was one of the top dev teams at the company.  I shared an office with this other new hire, Darren Massena, who was way smarter than me but a nice guy and who later became the architect and main developer of a kids shell for Windows which was touted as being very cool but ended up being rejected by our customers.

This was the era of being a "cool" super smart dev at one of the biggest software companies in the world and egos were super big in those days.

Since I didn't know C at the time of my hire, my first job was to go with our team to Boca Raton in Florida and work on the OS/2 kernel with the guys.  I was given a very poorly written scheduler function to fix and turned 100 locs into about 3 - (IBM in those days paid by the line of code).

The rest of my time there I really had little I was able to do and played my guitar to help soothe the atmosphere for the others.  This historic shot was taken of the team there.  We did some amazing things, blew the IBM execs away and got that baby shipped several months later.

For that we got a 2 week all expenses paid trip to Maui by and with Bill Gates and Steve Balmer with spouses.  There never was a better ship party in the history of Microsoft.

After my early temporary offices I got a nice window office just 2 doors down from Steve Balmer's.

Dave Plumer had an office down and across the hall from me but we never really met each other or worked together.  We were two very lucky dudes that enjoyed a golden time at Microsoft when it was full of smart and motivated people, no HR, no lawyers, and tons of money coming in over time from the incredible stock options.

Another job I got was to do a "simple" mapping of window handles in and out of the presentation manager API.  This was at very early time in my career.  The assembly language was no problem for me, and it was a great way to get to know the system better, but the logistics of adding the mappings to every API that either took or returned an HWND was daunting as I had to mess with almost every file in the user.dll module while learning my editor, getting used to building tons of code that took hours to build, learning C, and dealing with a constantly churning source code with the SLM (AKA Slime) source control system.  

It left me frozen and overwhelmed.  

Even some tester's would come to help me and my boss had the whole team hold off in check-ins for a week to help me get the thing done.  But I just failed.  I simply could not get my head around the logistics of the problem and the project got handed over to another more experienced dev.  It was very much a project where everything had to be perfect or nothing would work.  

I was shattered.  

Steve Wood came to my office to talk with me and try to help me but I was so embarrassed I couldn't even talk to him.  If someone looked over my shoulder I couldn't think.  I sat there silent till he left.

Years later at a reunion of the NT team I tried to get a hold of him and apologize for that time.  We could have been good friends during my whole time in Systems had I not been so proud and embarrassed.

I had a terrible review for that period but my boss Neal Konzen, let me stay on board.  He knew I was just trying too hard.

From then on I was considered by many to be an idiot.  I even caught the guys one night talking about me (they hadn't realized I was in the room eating pizza with them) and when they realized that I was there, they were a bit embarrassed as was I.

So the massive expectations on my performance were lifted and I was given much smaller and simpler projects from then on to do.

One of those simpler projects was to write a sample DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) app for OS/2.  

DDE was a hack invented over a weekend by the Excel team to show off dynamic stock quotes to Roiters and was a bit clunky to use.  Yet as clunky as it was, it was needed to tell the shell in Windows III what icon an app used to identify itself at setup time.  So the protocol became imbedded into that OS well before I was even there and naturally was ported to OS/2 and NT.

I decided to make my own DLL with an API to simplify it for others.  When the test team got ahold of it, they told our dev manager, Karl Stock, that it was just too powerful an API to test in the time left to ship so they said they would just ship the source and not compile it.

That was fine by me.  I was just happy to have been able to do that and work at Microsoft with such amazing people.

A few months after we shipped, Adobe came to Microsoft and demanded that they port my DLL to Windows III and so I spent some time doing that.

Then Windows NT was starting up, I was tasked with porting it to there, but that was a much harder job because Windows NT had no global memory which DDE used for IPC (Inter-Process Communication).  I had to use kernel level "thunks" to simulate global memory.  My API became the only way to do IPC on NT because the old message protocol could not work on NT.

It eventually moved into the WIN23 API set in user32.dll and was there to stay.

After solving that problem, the OLE team approached me and wanted to use my DLL as the glue for OLE.

What I wrote became very much imbedded into the OS for many reasons.

We then hired a guy from the UK that had implemented a network version of DDE and I inherited that code to maintain as well.

So for about 7 years I was the DDE master of the universe and was quite happy with working on a limited domain of code that was all mine.

I often wonder what would have happened had I written a book on DDE as I had an idea for a convention of how to use DDE that may have caused it to have a much bigger impact on computing.  At the time, I just loved coding too much to take the time to write a book.

I did lots of other things as well including the OS/2 Icon Editor, the NT and OS/2 resource compiler, the Dialog Editor, The Win 16/32 porting layer, NT header files, and lots of bug fixes including handling NT system deadlock issues.

My bosses were so supportive despite the fact that I was a slow and pretty weak dev.

Later, on a large port of the icon code from Windows III to NT for XP, after two months of struggling with the port and enhancing it to do things Windows III couldn't do, my hard disk crashed and I had no backup!  That ended my time in Systems - the schedule slipped because of me and I had to go.

The rest of my time at Microsoft was working in the Applications division where I did projects like Sidewalk, eShop, MSN Yellowpages, and MSN Messenger.

The Messenger team had exceptional managers and I loved working with that team.

How I got fired, possibly due to an NSA back door in Windows NT

After 20 years at Microsoft as a dev, my son was about to graduate High School and I knew I might never be able to do a nice family vacation with him again. I decided to ask my manager if it would be ok if I took 2 months off to take my family to Europe.  This was close to my 20 year anniversary at the company.

My boss and my boss's boss were cool with that but once it got up to the VP level for approval I got the word that HR would not allow it.  I was told I simply didn't rate high enough in the dev hierarchy to do that.  My managers at the Messenger team were trying to get me to that level which involved giving me the responsibility of integrating 3 dev teams of work each day, testing it for bugs and getting ahold of the proper dev to fix it.  It wasn't very fun as there was no creativity in the job and high stress.

I never wanted to go up a ladder.  I just wanted to do what I did best and do it well.

I told them "either I am coming back or I am not." and HR would not budge.  I took the vacation and left the company.

Now there is an interesting back story to this and that is the NSA back door issue.  

A few months before this vacation idea happened, I heard an announcement that the NSA had a big secret project for the NT team.  I was very suspicious of a back-door going in so I emailed all the V.P.s in my division asking if this was so.

No response was ever received.

Another weird thing about my leaving Microsoft was that HR had scheduled an exit interview with me but when I went to that meeting, they took my key-card and the person I was to speak with was nowhere to be found.  I was stood up.

No exit interview for me - and I was quite upset that they would basically fire me because I took a 2 month unpaid vacation after 20 years of loyal service to that company.

It left a bitter taste in my mouth but I don't blame anybody at the company but HR.

It was a very different attitude from the "we're not proud" one I came in with.

Why I succeeded

Most of my best accomplishments at Microsoft were due to my attitude of helping others.  It seemed every time I did a good deed for either the customer or others, it would come back to me as a benefit.

People liked working with me because I was not an ego-maniac or overly proud and I didn't care what work they had for me - I'd happily do it.

  

When I was at UC Berkeley, I had to work with the SPICE circuit simulator program which had a very cryptic way of describing a circuit for input to the program.  So I wrote up a quick-reference card with TROFF that fit on a 3x5" card for myself and decided to give it to the head professor of the SPICE program for others to benefit from.  For that the professor gave me 15 accounts on the most powerful computers on campus at that time.

What I didn't realize at the time was that he also listed me as a contributor to the SPICE program.

So back in 1986, when I was interviewing with Microsoft, on interviewer asked me "didn't you work on SPICE?" and I just said "yes" which was true, but they thought I wrote the code.  No all I did was write a quick-reference card for the user.

This might be why they waited 3 months for me to start and threw me into one of the top dev teams in the company right off the bat.

Another example was that I did lots of cleanup to the NT header files and put my name on just about every one I worked on in the file log.

When I was interviewing with the top network dev for the Messenger team, many years later, he basically offered me a job on the spot with no interview questions.  It was because my name was all over those header files that he simply assumed that I was one of the gods of NT.  

I ended up being a fairly weak UI dev for that team but everyone supported and respected me simply because I had so much experience.

Overall I am so grateful for having had the opportunity to enjoy "the good old days" as described by Dave Cutler one day.  They were truly some of the most rewarding and memorable years of my life.

Sandy

 Yes it's yet another case of purposeful design to rip off the customer and make more cash.

I own a Toyota Prius and there are some good things about it but a couple of issues have really pissed me off.  One is my emissions system which has some problem that causes the check engine light to come on.  I cannot (according to the dealer) get that error code bypassed so I can get my check-engine light back into service for truely serious issues.  The emissions feature is only there to satisfy an California law.  I live in Idaho so it's not a problem for me to have a hairline crack that is leaking some emissions out somewhere.

So I have no working check-engine light and I have no way of observing battery charte state, oil temperature or pressure or other such things that might really be important to know sometime.

A more recent issues came up that has promoted this post.

My tire sensor light whet on and upon investigation was due to the battery for the sensor (pictured above) going dead.  The tire guy told me that these simple watch batteries last about 7 years and then poop out.  That is nicely beyond the waranty period of my car and it tells me that all 4 sensors are likely to fail soon.

Normally one would just change the battery to fix this but Toyota glues the battery in place so it cannot be replaced!  So I had to pay about $90 to replace the entire tire sensor.

Thanks Toyota!

I wonder if they will go the way of GM someday who is entering bankruptcy despite billions of tax-payer dollers being spent to prop them up.  When you don't service the customer, customers go away (if they have a choice).

Free Energy at your fingertips

 

Free energy is all around us

My home has a nice geo-thermal heating system that has worked for years.  If you can afford one, get one as it is way more efficient than any other heating system I know of.

That's because the earth is an infinite heat source and heat sync.  Just dig a trench about 4' down, run a tube through it, fill the trench with water if you like or use a pond to make heat conductivity more efficient and you can now use a simple heat-pump to heat or cool your home.

But no there more!

With the use of a sterling engine, you can actually generate electricity from the temperature differential you get with your geo-thermal heat pump and guess what? As long as your trench is big enough to transfer the heat quickly enough, you can use that to power your home as well!

I spoke with an HVAC specialist at costco one time and mentioned this idea to him.  He said, "sure it's possible but then we would be out of business".

Yes, that IS the problem.  The power's that be do not want simple and free energy.  It breaks their whole machivelian plans for global conquest.

Well, I'm just sayin - it CAN BE DONE.

You can buy a toy sterling engine for $60 here.

Good luck in finding a large one that can do useful work for you.  Bit it is definitely possible and simple with no fancy perpetual machine BS.  The idea works.

C'mon Elon, get with the program!

You don't really own that OS

 Hey so why can't I use more than 8% of my CPU on Windows?

I was running this sed tool on a very large file that taks a long time to complete.  That process is cranking as fast as it can.  I only have 4 CPUs and one shows its cranking full bore but the task list shows only 8% of CPU being used.

So where is the other 92% of my CPU?

I think somebody's lying to me.

Windows 10 - ready to F#$% you if you step out of line.

So I was wondering why my system was taking so long to boot.  Brand new PC with my first time using Windows 10 for only a month or so.  Now you gotta know I was leery of the next version, as it was now 2019 and I had never yet run windows 10.  Why?  Well because of surprises like this.

I decided to go into msconfig.exe and look at my services at startup.  My GOD!  It looked like there were about 160 services!

I noticed a note (can't recall how I saw it) that said that some services could not be disabled.

Aha!

That told me that someone was wise enough to not allow a naive user to disable critical services needed for the system!

Ok.  It should be safe to try this.

DISABLE ALL SERVICES AT BOOT

Ok lets see how this does with boot time.

....

"Your password is incorrect.  Due to security changes Windows is no longer able to access your PIN"

...

Uh ohhh.......

Tried everything I could think of.  Couldn't seem to get into the BIOS with DEL or ESC.

hmmm.

I looked up some forums and some people had managed to hit CTRL when logging in or waiting long enough (several hours) and eventually logging in - but others had to do a complete reinstall!

I tried their hacks...  no luck.

Better take it in to the Computer Guy in Orofino for an expert opinion.

They had several USB and DVD boot images to try to "crack" the password.  No luck.  The new BIOS is VERY SECURE.  Lots of interlocking settings that all have to be just right to be able to boot into a USB stick or the DVD.  This guy managed to get one image to boot but not the cracker one.
I did manage to learn that getting into the BIOS now required either F12 at startup or to hold the SHIFT key down when pressing the restart button on the desktop (no it doesn't work with any of the other 100s of "restart" buttons placed throughout the settings UI) which will get you into DELL's troubleshooting boot system which is separate from the BIOS.
I left him with it for the day and did some errands.

When I returned, he had no luck in getting in and charged me $27.50 for his time, which I perfectly understood.  As I left I said

"In software, sometimes you can work all day and accomplish nothing" 

- which is very true.

So my box has been reinstalled to factory settings (that took me several hours to feel confident there was no other way to go that would work and to feel comfortable with all the settings of the BIOS, the DELL troubleshooting shell and the special OS fix and reinstall support shell from DELL).

Why does crap like this happen?

Security and Laziness and Greed

Sometime in the mid 90s a bunch of very good tester's at Microsoft were let go.  These guys were our team of monkey testers.  They didn't write a lot of code but instead simply pounded on the UI of whatever project they worked on to just find usability bugs.  This is called "usability testing" and is actually where some of the best oversights of PM specs and Dev designs are found.

There is simply no way for these kinds of bugs to be found any other way.  AI is way too weak to try to find usability bugs.  They require creative thinking and sound judgment to find and a it takes lot of time.  To properly fix these bugs can sometimes require a complete redesign of the UI.

Without this kind of testing, and I am sure Microsoft still does some of this, it is impossible to catch traps like what I fell into.  msconfig did exactly what I had told it but likely some "Update" had changed the service dependencies and left at least one critical service unprotected from "disablement" and there I am F$%$^ed royally.

One thing in Microsoft's favor, there are now convenient ways in Windows 10 to provide feedback to Microsoft on this stuff.  Do they read it?  I'll never know.  They've gotten a lot of feedback from me - I'll say that for sure.

Luckily, I have had to reinstall windows (all versions) over the years so many times that I have a pretty sound way of saving my important data and being able to relatively recover from this crap - but it still usually takes about 3 days before my system is back to a state where I can stop installing stuff  and tweaking settings I need and just use it.

___

Last year I went to a Windows NT reunion and got to meet a bunch of my old work-mates.  Fellow Devs that all contributed to a product that has made Microsoft over a Trillion Dollars since we finished it.

Very few testers were there.  Only leads and managers with long time commitment to the company were invited.  The usability testers simply were no longer with us to enjoy the celebration.  I am sad for them.  I valued there input much more than most I think.  This is because it takes a human mind to make a software product truly usable by a human.

There are tools we could make and give customers to help them understand how to know which services are safe to pull out but there are too many forces that simply don't want to bother or share this kind of information.  Its just more code to break and test and more documentation to write and maintain and makes more customers fell confident enough to mess up their systems.

However I would love to see a tool that can show a map of all service dependencies and another one that shows all setting dependencies (that one may be impossible to make automatically) and a website that documents the registry (which I proposed to the microsoft.com team many years ago), the services and the settings - ALL of them for ALL versions and ALL updates of Windows - so users can make a better educated guess as to how to adjust things to their needs.

To maintain this stuff you almost have to put links or references into the code itself to help keep changes in the code propagated to the documentation and settings UI.  This is a lot more work for the dev but I think is the only way to keep the whole product from going insane and eventually having pitfalls like the one I fell into.

Unfortunately, just like the history of the automobile, eventually there just are no more ways to let the customer fix or change his own product.  Eventually only the corporate devs will have the tools and knowledge needed to tweak the configuration of an OS to their needs and for the sake of money and time, the producer of the software will be forced to lock the user out of most of the guts of the product and deliver a less flexible, less usable product to the user.  

It's just too complicated not to.

:(

On Scientific Research

This is a response to a post from a friend of mine no facebook reproduced here:

Everyday, I drive by the waterfront so I'm interested in the ships I see there. Probably the coolest are the Polar Sun and the Polar Star. They are the two largest ice breakers in the US. The Polar Sun is deactivated and it's parts are being used to keep the Polar Star running.

The Polar Star has one mission... to open the channel every year to McMurdo Station. Without it, our science stations in Antarctica are at risk, since McMurdo is the largest base and supports most of the others.

There's been a push to get a new icebreaker to replace her... since if she breaks and we can't repair her with parts from the Polar Sun... we're kinda screwed.

The Senate allocated $750 million in Feb to build a replacement... and it still needs to be passed. But the Donald "littlefinger" Trump moved all the funding from the icebreaker to the border wall. So much more Making American Science Great Again.

https://phys.org/ne…/2017-07-polar-icebreakers-critical.html

https://www.stripes.com/…/coast-guard-icebreaker-funding-re…

About this article

PHYS.ORG

US need for four polar icebreakers 'critical,' warns report

The rapid pace of global warming and ice melting at the poles have underscored the "critical" need for the United States to build four new polar icebreaker ships, US officials said Tuesday.

It would be very sad to see our Antarctica Scientific investment be lost due to the loss of this ice breaker.  However I think there are other things to think about before we bash Trump for this problem.
First of all, providing for the common defense, as is stated in the preamble of our constitution is one of the primary reasons to have government.  A border wall is a project well within this goal and is thus an appropriate project for federal funding.  Providing for scientific advancement could also be deemed as furthering the common defense but it is unlikely that Antarctica research will contribute much to defense technology.
Something that many Americans seem to be oblivious to is the fact that every dime extracted by taxes to pay for projects funded by the federal government are taken at gun-point.  Any funding of projects that are not authorized by the constitution is an outright theft.  This is so common now-a-days that people see it as some kind of right that the government and voters have.  They forget that all power the government has was granted to it by The People, which our unique constitution recognizes as the only lawful source of authority in a non-theocratic government.
At the end of the life of a democracy, it's collapse always happens when the majority realizes they can vote for anything and steal it from the collective whole without any seeming consequences.  Eventually there are simply not enough producers to feed the greedy majority and the system collapses economically and usually with much violence in the streets.
Our economy is failing for several reasons.  A fiat money system owned by a private corporation, a great burden of arbitrary regulation well outside of the legal limits allowed by our constitution, and a very poor educational system that has produced a generation of feel-good know-nothings that lack the common sense necessary to sustain this economy.
The average American has never read or understood the concepts behind our constitutional republic, nor have they probably ever read the Federalist or Anti-Federalist papers which explains why we have what we have.
Without this basis of understanding we find many many people simply parroting the latest memes touted by the Mainstream Media as fact and true without question.
Another point on the ice-breaker issue is that government funding of research tends to skew it in the direction of whatever beliefs or policies are in place.  Scientists are not free to explore what seems most promising but rather what is most fund-able.  Grant writing is probably the most important skill for a scientist these days that wishes to pursue her chosen area of research.  Picking a research project that bucks the idea of global warming, for example, will have a very hard time getting funding.  This is a disservice to those paying the research bills - the US Taxpayer.
Another point is that the media is commonly used when funding is needed for a particular endeavor.  Ever notice how NASA seems to have a breakthrough in finding life on other planets just at the time congress is voting on its budget?  Ever notice how these great breakthroughs turn out to be nothing after the funding is obtained?
How critical really is this ice-breaker?  It would be real nice to have $750M given to get a new one.  Seems the rich can't get together and make it happen, no lets steal from the poor instead... ever think about that angle?  It isn't just "evil corporations" that steal from people. (and they don't steal it.  They provide a product or service people are willing to pay for.)  We throw a fit when corporations get a tax break but don't realize that every dime that they are taxed simply is passed on to the customer.  The price of a service or commodity is set by the market and the entire marked is adversely affected by both taxes and regulations.
Now I am not arguing that the wall Trump is building is necessarily the right thing to do, but it certainly falls within his job description and it is a project he promised to do on the campaign trail.  He was duly and lawfully elected to do what he promised and amazingly enough, he seems to be keeping his promises.
How does the executive branch "move" funding from one project to another when congress has full control of the purse strings?  Clearly, if the executive branch can do such things, congress is not doing its job to stop this.  Let's at least point the "little finger" in the right direction.

Why AirBnB SUCKS

This is unbelievable.  Airbnb has a terrible website when used by someone in my niche situation.  My big handicap is that I do not want to have or use a smartphone, yet it is IMPOSSIBLE as a host to use them without one.
When I got my first customer after several months of having been signed up as a host on this site, I received a rather cryptic text message that said someone wanted to stay at my place for two whole months (a $12,000 value).  Yet when I tried to log in I found my account had been hacked by someone and my name and profile photo was someone from India.  I can't imagine why anyone would hack an AirBnB host account but they did.
I spent hours trying to contact a person at AirBnB and could not do so.  After hours of searching I finally found a phone number burred DEEP within their help system. (BTW its 844-424-7262)
I needed to talk to a person because once I reset my password and tried to regain access to my account, I found that they had added a required photo method to verify my identity.  Unfortunately, they would only allow me to upload the photo via a smartphone.  Never mind the fact that I could take a reasonable picture of someone, hold it in front of the phone and take a picture.  The fact that I could not upload an image from my computer made it impossible for me to get back into my account.  I finally had to borrow someone elses phone to accomplish this step.  LAME-O-Tech
By the time this was done, my customer had been lost.

The cryptic url you get from AirBnB in your phone text message includes 0s and Os which can be very confusing.  I had to try 4 variations to get the right URL and the one that appeared right said "You are not authorized to view this message".  Well that helps a lot.
What was also weird was that when I went to my account online there was absolutely no evidence that I had any customers interested in my place.  The support person could not explain or correct this either.
The call center guy also had to admit, I cannot use their system without a smartphone.
I will send them a link to this article as feedback to their system and hope maybe somebody there will be able to make changes so I and others like me can use their services.

AirBnB seems to run their company like US Worst/Verizon does.  An impossible maze of attempts to thwart people from asking intelligent questions and getting real help.

As a test, on their help page I tried searching for "How do I ask a question" - no relevant answers were found.

Specific fixes they could do:
1) Forget photo verification via cell phone.  It doesn't prove anything, and it can easily be thwarted.  Either let people upload an image or get rid of this ridiculous method of user verification.  Better to get them to sign in with facebook - at least then you have a face recognition algorithm working for you.

2) for shortcut URLs don't use 0s or Os - just use lowercase letters - its not a password so keep it simple for users to type in if necessary.  In fact, I would implement it so that words from a simple dictionary are used.  Imagine how simple it would be to type in https://www.airbnb.me/lovelyflowerstogether.

3) Put your support number on the root help page.  Don't pretend to be happy to help me if you hide your number.  Better, add chat support or true email support or some kind of ticket system.  It works and things don't get lost.  Maybe your customer is like me and lives way out where there is little or no cell coverage - ever think of that?  Let people really talk to you using an efficient system via multiple channels.  I can understand the cost of personal support but with a good chat-bot you may be able to still answer most questions in an automated fashion.  Hiding your support or making it hard for people to talk to you just cuts you off from you customers and pisses them off.

If I see no progress in fixing this so I can use it, I will simply have to shut down my account and go elsewhere.  Don't do this guys!  I want to use you if I can!

Note that I have a general problem with all these "middle man" rental listing websites.  A host can only manage so many middle-men and besides loosing profit on their rentals, every site is different and there is simply no way to support all the possible ways a person might offer or manage his rental.  A small fee to allow the listing to simply contain a link to the renter's website would be wonderful and I would gladly pay a reasonable fee for the listing.
If this isn't done soon, I bet a craigs-list kind of rental website will become a defacto winner and eventually dethrone all of you "middle-men".