It's good to moan.

I'm what you might call a seasoned moaner. If something displeases me, people know about it. I have an opinion and I like to exercise it - it's quite a good way to start up a conversation.

Yesterday, I spent 3 hours trying to SSH into a mediatemple share, only to find out that I'd been IP banned without being told. My attempt to connect was timing out and timing out with no feedback whatsoever. At this point, I didn't have a client login, so I could only assume that (seeing as my colleagues could connect to the share) it was an issue with my connection. After 3 hours of debugging, I asked for a client login which was promptly created. When I logged in to the web interface, I was greeted with a "someone is trying to log in from your IP, but we've banned them" message (which the person who created the account didn't get, by the way!) that allowed me to remove the lock from my IP.

Needless to say, I was furious (I have quite a short fuse), so TO THE INTERNETS I went. What followed can only be described as the best way to handle a public complaint about a company/service:

So, now I've wasted my afternoon, but I'm not mad about it any more - I'm actually pleased that mediatemple took my thoughts on board (or at least appeared to - whether they're implemented or not is largely irrelevant, next time I can't connect, I'll just check if I'm locked out again!) and made the effort to resolve a problem, even though I didn't direct it right at them.

So yeah, moaning is OK sometimes. As long as you're moaning about something that cares about how it looks!