Venice is a series of tubes

Venice has this really awesome city wifi. You pay once and can get a connection in all the hot spots (I mean that in both senses of the phrase) around town - not to expensive either.

I happily logged in to their registration system and paid the eight euro at which point I was redirected back to the login page, asking for a surname and password. Hmmm.. I thought I just paid for a username and password, but I never saw one.

You can browse the city oases for free so I began searching for troubleshooting tips, a contact link, anything. There was a "contact us" link but it appeared to be broken. Erg.

Further digging I finally found a help page that said that once you pay for access, they will email you a username and password. Yes, you read that right, they email you the username and password.

Now if I had access to my email, why in pluperfect hell would I be trying to pay for wifi?

So I began my search for a free wifi hotspot somewhere in town where I could log in to my email to retrieve the password they were meant to send me so I could then log in and use the access I had paid for. Brilliant.

My searching was in vain, however, and it soon began to rain, rendering me soaking wet. I retreated back to the hostel for a nap and to cool my nerves a bit, being somewhat annoyed by the situation. I was able to call the support line from the hostel lobby and they said my password would be in my email. Yup, they really are that stupid.

When I told her I didn't have access to email she suggested walking around until I find access to check my email, and she had no way of retrieving my account credentials. Clearly this wholemoperation is being run by shaved chimps.

The other two occupants of our room showed up, two guys from England about the same age as the girls. We all hung out and talked a while, and they decided they were going to go get a "maxi pizza" - a pizza about the size of a wagon wheel the girls had enjoyed themselves the night before. They invited me along, but I was still bothered by ts whole wifi situation and wanted to try one last time, so I told them I'd meet up with them later.

I asked around until I found an Internet cafe, paid eight more euros to use their crappy computer, and checked my email. Hmm ... No email from the city. I spent the time I had purchased instead writing an email to the people about how stupid their system is.

Further investigation revealed that you are supposed to buy the wifi seven days in advance of arriving in Venice. This leads me to some important questions:

1. Not being Marty McFly and not even owning a time traveling DeLorean, How the hell would I know what random wifi hotspot I'm going to happen to be standing next to seven days from now?

2. If you have to buy in advance, why does the hotspot only give you access to one page, where the only thing you can do is buy access? Wouldn't it be better to say "oh hey if you didn't buy access yet, you're not going to get it now, so entering your credit card info here will put money in our pockets, but it won't give you Internet."

3. What mouth breathing retard came up with a system so crappy? It's actually more difficult to make it suck this bad then it is to do a pay and go system like every other hotspot on the face of the planet.

4. Do they really have people manually processing payments and creating wifi accounts and sending out emails? They must realize that it's the 21st century and these things can be automated now.

5. How did people so dumb manage to configure all these routers?

I still have not received my username or password or a response to my angry email, and it's been two weeks. Time to issue a chargeback.