I don't know why, but Cingular apparently does not want me paying my
bill. When I log into my account to pay online, I was taken to an
intermediate page where I was asked, in a mandatory fashion, for my
email address. I'm not a big fan of giving that sucker out for no
reason, so I simply clicked the 'Continue' button. Unfortunately, the
button was a link whose href was the lovely
[[http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Octothorpe][octothorpe]]. This of course
meant I was going nowhere by means of that button. I was quite peeved at
this point because, not only did I not get an explanation from the page
telling my why my email was required, but I also had no explanation for
why the continue button failed to do so. The age-old adage, "Fail to
communicate with me properly once, you suck; fail twice, now I'm pissed"
came to mind. So what's a web geek to do? Obviously search the page's
javascript for the form submission line and execute it directly through
[[https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1843/][Firebug]] commandline!
Should any Cingular users get frustrated as well, get Firebug (and
Firefox, which I have to mention since Google Analytics tells me the
internets are alive with IE users still - shame on you all), and execute
this line of code:

#+BEGIN_QUOTE
  document.updateRequiredRegisteredInfoActionForm.submit();
#+END_QUOTE

Not only did this forward me on to my account page, but it also bypassed
the need to fill in my email for no good reason. I get enough spam as it
is. So there it is my friends; simple, one-liner to defeat Cingular's
attempts to be poor communicators. A silver lining here, besides getting
in, is the lesson learned from Cingular's mistake: Don't suck at
communicating with your users! So long, and thanks for all the fish.