What customer service?

I wanted to request some seats on a BA flight. So I went to their website, looked up my booking and went to the request-a-seat page. It showed me a bunch of choices and then hung the browser, causing it to stop responding. I tried with another browser, then with IE. Then I tried on another computer (this one running Windoze) with two browsers there. All of them hung interminably (except FF on OSX was smart enough to catch it and give a dialog saying "A script on this page is not responding. Terminate it?")

So I call up BA's online help phone number. Of course this means I'm talking to a woman in India who's just sitting in front of her web browser literally doing exactly what I just did. And of course she can't work the goddamn website any better than I can. So she tells me it was showing me the seat map in error and there aren't that many seats available. OK, well surely there are at least enough seats for all the ticketed passengers?

Also, they announce when you call the number that if you book a ticket via one of their "online specialists" (read: Indians with web browsers) you have to pay $20 per passenger. This is for the pleasure of having someone else operate my web browser over a phone connection. Cheers.

Shouldn't the interwang be making life easier and cheaper for consumers instead of being an endless pain in my ass?