Arrrrrgh!

I've just spent the last five hours in customer-service hell.

I'm trying to port my contacts from Outlook onto my new phone. Should be easy, right? I've got Bluetooth connections on both my laptop and phone. There's even a "Send to device via Bluetooth" link right up there in the Outlook the drop-down menu. Simple as a bread sandwich, right? Oh, Hell no.
All of the contacts transfer, but very few of the numbers do. Furthermore, it has isolated all of my contacts that I only have listed by first-name (which are the ones I use the most) off in some pariah-folder that I can only access by clicking on no fewer than 5 separate buttons, plus those names don't show up when using the search function. I tried adding the last names, but those contacts still remain in the "outcast" folder. It also proceeded to re-name all of my files. Now If I want to call Joe, I have to look under "D" for 'Dog, Old'. You're fucking kidding me, right?
I called up Verizon, I was amazed that I got a representative right off of the bat. She took down all of my information and listened to my explanation of my problem, then promptly put me on hold for damn near 40 minutes, then (somehow) managed to disconnect me.
As I was storming around the living room throwing around my stack of old (yet unread) Wired Magazines, and swearing up a blue-streak that sent the dog running for the bathtub, I got a call from the Verizon tech division who (miraculously) managed to figure out that my call had been dropped.
I talked with that guy for about 10 minutes, when he decided to dial into the LG tech-support line. We both sat on hold for 15 more minutes until LG told me to enter my number, and that they would call me back promptly. That was 4 hours ago - Still no call. I probably won't hear from those assholes until Monday (if I'm lucky).
While I was biding my time I decided to take a closer look at what information was being omitted. I discovered that any number that was written out without any formatting transferred, whereas any formatted number didn't - IE: 8005551212 would show up, whereas (800) 555-1212 would not.
I then spent the next 2 hours online weeding through Microsoft "help" files in order to find out how to disable the masking function. After finding nothing, I decided to give MS a call. The recorded message told me that since Outlook was packaged with my computer when I purchased it, that I had to call Dell for any support issues. They offered to help me directly if I could enter in my credit card number for a fee of $35.00. Bastards.
While I was sitting on hold for Dell waiting for 'the soonest available representative', I discovered a thread on a hacker BBS that explained that the masking tool was hard-coded into the Outlook program, and the only way around it was to add unused 'dummy' characters into all of my Outlook phone numbers. That would take way-longer than just entering the numbers that I needed. While I was trying to wrap my brain around just how asinine that was, the Dell guy finally picked up the line. I told him that I had just called to let him know that he was a dirty twat, and hung-up.
I'm screwed. There's nothing I can really do to fix this nonsense. It's all a fucking rigmarole of proprietary horseshit. Something that should be a delightful dance around the may-pole, turns into a freaking psy-ops experiment. I can't believe that people willingly put up with this crap.
With my old Blackberry, all I had to do was plug the damned thing in and everything was roses, so I know that this can be done. But, with LG, no such luck.
Now I have to erase everything and just enter all 165 contacts in all over again. Granted, I could have done this several times over in the time I've wasted trying to do it the "easy" way, but that's not the point. THINGS SHOULD WORK THE WAY THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO WITHOUT JUMPING THROUGH AN ENDLESS SERIES OF HOOPS.
In all of that poking-around I did learn a lot about my (stupid, stupid) phone, the Verizon site, and Microsoft's tech-labyrinth. I even managed to change the phone's master function to read "Retard" instead of "LX9900", so that's something.

In summation:
Fuck Verizon Wireless.
Fuck LG.
Fuck Microsoft.
Fuck Dell.

Add 'em all to my Jihad List.