"please kindly fill out our Customer Registration Form"

At the risk of yet again being labelled a grumpy old man by an ex-colleague from my old JobStreet days, I'm airing a frustration - an unhappiness, actually - over a recent small incident.

There I was, making a simple email enquiry from a company in Taiwan about two of their products and my initial message to them was forwarded to a sales staff.

After waiting two days - that's how fast and eager they are about procuring new business, a lady there finally wrote to me and asked me to go to their website and fill in a form "...in order to reply to you and offer our service to you more quickly and more efficiently..."

Thanks but no thanks. Gosh, all I really wanted to know was the price for the product and the shipping cost to Penang. It really baffled me that the company was unwilling to disclose the information until I completed the registration form. No time for all that, unfortunately.