Two new toys, actually: a few days earlier Sonja gave me a digital photo camera for my birthday... :-)
For the ultimate test, I installed Half-Life on my new pooter. I used to play that on my laptop, but I had to settle for a mere 800 x 640 resolution and a few other less-than-great settings just to be able to play it. Now I'm running it at 1024 x 768 resolution and with the various other settings all the way up, and it's running SMOOOOOTHLY. Gaming has become a lot more fun since last Wednesday. <GRIN>
(The down side being that with a faster computer, the baddies also seem to run a lot faster... <GRIN> )
So, why am I not *entirely* happy right now?
Observant listmembers will have noticed my absence from the list for the last several days. Unfortunately, that is not entirely due to me blasting away the baddies in Half-Life and not having the time to go on-line. It's worse: for the umpteenth time, my ISP (Chello) managed to screw up bigtime, and killed my Internet connection. Again. :-(
I pay my monthly subscription fee for Chello through direct debit. There is always enough money in my bank account for those payments, but for some reason Chello never charged my bank account for it in the last three months. So, last week their files indicated that I was three months behind on my payments.
Now, Chello are notorious for lousy communications with their customers (and that's just one part of their bad reputation). They never bothered to contact me in *any* way about the lack of payments; instead they simply decided to kill my Internet connection again. And of course, Chello being Chello, they didn't do that at a reasonable time like Monday morning, which would have given me the chance to fix the problem immediately. No, they shut down the connection last Friday afternoon at around 17:30 hours -- which meant I had to wait till Monday before I could get anything done. (Wasn't the first time either; last December they killed my connection the day before XMas, which meant that I spent XMas and a day without an Internet connection.)
Last Sunday I paid the outstanding amount by telephone, so the money should be in their bank account the next day. Yesterday morning (Monday) I sent them a fax, telling them the money had been paid, and ordering them to immediately restore my Internet connection. Chello being Chello, they didn't...
When Sonja called them, the woman on the other side of the line said it would take two to three work days for them to restore the connection. Access was finally restored sometime this morning. Total downtime: 88 hours.
This wasn't the first time I had problems with them. They still haven't managed to properly process our change of address (which took place in October 2001!), they still make a mess of their bookkeeping, and they still can't manage to send me the monthly invoice they are supposed to send me. And don't get me started on the quality (or rather, the lack thereof) of their 10-cents-per-minute-and-be-kept-on-hold-for-45-minutes helpdesk... :-(
It won't come as a surprise that I am completely fed up with them by now; this calls for a "shape up or ship out". They don't shape up, so it's time for me to ship out. So, yesterday afternoon I sent them another fax, telling them that I will end my subscription per May 1st, and last night signed up for ADSL. It's a slower connection (256 Kb/s download, 64 Kb/s upload)* but at least its a lot cheaper (EUR 24.95 per month for the first year plus a one time expense of EUR 129 for an ADSL modem, no setup fee; Chello charges EUR 49.95 per month for cable Internet).
*Note: that's kilo*bits* per second, not kilo*bytes* per second...
Now we only wonder if Chello will deny ever receiving my subscription cancellation fax. Knowing Chello, the likeliness of them doing exactly that is > 99 percent.
Better start preparing for yet another battle with them. :-(
Jeroen "Chello delenda est" van Baardwijk
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