Vodafone offers an online account management facility, which allows you do various things relating to your phone account including making a prepay payment.

I registered for the site months ago, and I remember it as a painful process. First, they require that your password is at least six characters long and contains at least one number and one letter. That’s fine – I tend to create cryptic passwords anyway – but for some reason whatever I was entering wouldn’t get accepted by Vodafone’s site and I ended up having to invent some bizarre password which I didn’t keep a record of and instantly forgot.

Again, that shouldn’t be much of a problem in itself because Vodafone offers a convenient “Forgotten your password?” page which allows you to reset your password by entering your mobile number and your date of birth. Pity it doesn’t work.

I’m reasonably confident that I know my own birth date, but I entered it three times in different formats (Vodafone suggests the newbie-confusing “Y-M-D” format, but I also tried “D-M-Y” and “M-D-Y”) and every time it rejected me. After the third attempt, it locked me out of the site for 24 hours. Great.

So now I have to top up using the over-complicated and tedious phone service system. But that’s another rant altogether.