A popular retailer offers us an easy gift solution by "grabbing" their plastic gift voucher and activating it online. Wow - I'll be in that! What a time saver! No queueing in busy shopping centres! I even avoid the nauseating Christmas musak that also annoys a large part of the local demographic who like me have little interest in commercial perversions of Christian celebrations. I digress.

The gift voucher wrap-around logically begins its instructions with the URL where to start. OK, so the page doesn't exist. Oh phew, there's a prompt in the left column - let's go there!

I carefully enter a long unbroken clump of 18 digits, scratch bits off for a card PIN, enter more numbers, click NEXT, credit card numbers blah blah, and immediately I'm presented with an informative message, replete with spelling mistakes. Error Occured An error has occured. Please note down the details below. User Error The session has expired Session expired? Surely I wasn't that slow.

I try again. I carefully enter what now seems like a 40 digit card number, enter more numbers again, click NEXT, credit card numbers blah blah... Again the informative ERROR message with the same irritating spelling mistakes. After doing this all a third time in Safari instead of Firefox, and by now I've nearly remembered this sequence of integers by heart, I send them a snarly message about wasting my time and suggest that they test their processes before going public. I don't expect a reply. Oh, but now I do finally have another gift solution :)