First up, I want to apologize. Due to a server upgrade glitch at InfoWorld, I have not received any Gripe Line e-mails for at least a week. Foolishly, I assumed all was well in the world of IT and that you were all happy. But as several readers who were either resourceful enough to track down an alternate e-mail for me or who posted in the comments, that's clearly not what's going on. E-mails to me have been going into the ether or -- occasionally -- giving the sender a bounce message. It's all fixed now. But if you sent me a gripe in the last week or so and I haven't responded -- even if you didn't get a bounce error message -- I probably did not get it. Please resend!

In response to "HP holds firm on hinge recall deadline," Nick writes, "Suppose you had a cardiac pacemaker. And there is a recall because some units are defective. So you reply to the recall and learn that your unit is not defective. But to be safe, the manufacturer monitors the situation to see if the defect turns up. And at that point they replace it. They do not -- as HP has decided to do -- rule that if it's not broke now, tough luck for later." Needless to say, Nick is not happy with the way HP is (not) handling the hinge-crack recall now that the deadline for filing has passed.

[ Also on InfoWorld: "HP holds firm on hinge recall deadline," "Verizon billing error may be rampant," and "Stuck in Dell's endless tech support loop" | Frustrated by tech support? Get answers in InfoWorld's Gripe Line newsletter. ]

And it seems, from reading the comments on "Verizon billing error may be rampant" post, that a lot of people discovered mysterious data charges on their Verizon bills after reading that. (I only received one letter about this, though, so if you wrote to me before today looking for help, please resend.) Tdesmit writes in the comments that after reading about the data-charge problem and waiting on hold for over an hour, he finally got through to technical support.