Edward W.

After many years of running an NCAA pool with pencil and paper, I decided to go online (once participation jumped to 70+). I picked FunOfficePools.com because they offered flexibility of scoring, ease of registration and a lot of nice features for users.

I should have known I was in trouble from the start when, on Selection Sunday, the geeks managed to place teams in the wrong regional brackets! I mean, all you have to do is copy what you see on CBS or ESPN! They did finally fix that problem, but not without erasing several of my players' entries.

As usual, I have over seventy participants and all are excited about using an online site where you can go make changes to your picks right up until the first game of the tournament. In fact, several player take advantage of that feature (including myself), much to our dismay.

Anybody who accessed their bracket in any way within three hours of the deadline ended up LOSING their saved entry information! Not only that, the site would accept BUT NOT SAVE any attempted re-entry of picks. It was like watching your house burn down while you waited for the fire department to arrive, but they never do. When the deadline came, the site simply switched off access to all brackets (regardless of the problem) and those without entries were just out of luck.

I repeatedly contacted the admin manager, begging him to open the site back up to contestants so they could reconstruct what they had done. He refused. His reply was to have pool managers use a link to re-enter picks manually using the manager's access. What I could not make him understand is that NOBODY printed copies of their entry... that's why we chose to USE HIS ONLINE SITE - so we wouldn't HAVE to deal with printed copies. A third of my participants were left with blank bracket entries.

The site administrator is quite indignant about the mess they caused. What he does not understand is that it's MY reputation that is damaged by all this, not his. I trusted him with my good name, and I got smeared for it.

There must be MANY groups of people in this same situation, who trusted funofficepools.com to do what they claimed to be able to do.

I am making sure that I tell everyone I possibly can about this. I am writing to every company with an advertisement on his site to tell them they are making a mistake supporting this site. I am writing to every website ratings board I can find to tell this story.

STAY AWAY from funofficepools.com. They're unprofessional, they're small-time and they will screw you with bad service just when you need them most.