power to the IT guy

After reading on Frugal Duchess (who makes me want to stick pins in my eyes much of the time but has enough useful information to make me keep reading) that her power company gives rebates for the purchase of energy efficient AC units, something we are shopping for, I decided to give my power company a shot. I found yet another entity that cannot handle the four character extension to my email address. You have .com, I have .name. It's like Y2K all over again. Many systems are not set up to accommodate four characters after the last dot in an email address.  

Yes, I have a gmail account, and a .mac account, but I use them for specific things. I don't usually give them out when someone asks for my email address.

As I usually do, I filled out their customer service form, which also won't take the email address but thankfully does not make it a required field, I got a phone call within just a few minutes. Alas, the ultimate response was:

"Our IT guy is out of the country for a while. We'll have him look at it when he gets back."

I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.