"Your Support Request has been submitted to the Support Request"

I've been trying to cancel Resolver's Yahoo! Search Marketing account over the last day or so; it's not generating enough traffic to be worthwhile. The cancellation process is a little buggy.

First off, there's no "Cancel account" option that I can see on the page itself. Fair enough, I can understand why adding that has not been their top priority, though it would be nice to have. There is a "Customer support" link, however, which allows you to enter various kinds of "enquiries", including "Account administration" ones. So yesterday I used that to send a message asking for my account to be cancelled. It went through, though the acknowledgement page had slightly odd text (which I've used as the title of this post).

Today I received a response, which is a pretty decent turnaround time for customer service at a large company. It was well-worded and polite, with the normal "sorry to see you go" kind of thing. The only odd bit was was this:

If you wish to cancel your account, simply email us mentioning 'please cancel my account' and we will be happy to cancel your account out for you.

Um, OK. So I enter a support request asking them to cancel my account, and they send me an email asking me to send them an email asking them to cancel the account. Well, that's odd, but perhaps it's some kind of primitive security check, a way of making sure that I can send and receive email from the address linked to the account. So, I sent the email.

I just received an automated message from them, which said:

To ensure the security of our advertisers' account information, we now require all advertiser inquires [sic] to be submitted through our Support Request Form, a link to which is found at the bottom of nearly all pages within your account.

Right. So, to recap, I entered a support request asking them to cancel my account. They replied by sending me an email asking me to send them an email asking them to cancel my account. I sent them the email, and was instructed to send a support request, thus neatly closing the loop.

I think someone at Yahoo is a Kafka fan.