Damned ISP's...

I apologize in advance, this is a whiny post...

Recently, the owner of my ISP took the time out of his oh-so-busy schedule to email me and let me know that I'd been using too many hours of my unlimited service. He wanted to know if I could cut down my usage in order to help him save $$. In order to help me accomplish that, he interrupted my service for 2 days.

Not only did he interrupt my dail-up access, (Yes, I said dial-up. I live in the middle of BFE, what do you expect?) he cut off access to my email and to all customer service points of their system. So, not yet knowing what the problem was, I called customer service. The guy at customer service, (now named 'Kenny with the sexy voice') did tell me that the owner had suspended my account, but had locked everyone out of seeing why. He also told me that the owner was out of town. Great.

While all of this was happening, I signed up for a trial subscription to MSN. Their dial-up really is unlimited, but I absolutely cannot stand using webmail. I like all of my mail downloaded and saved, put in its respective folders. While I can download MSN mail into my Outlook, it just isn't the same. I think I'm going to keep looking for another provider.

Since I could connect to the internet again though, I went looking at my old ISP's site, trying to find the Terms of Use agreement. I ripped through that thing, trying to see if there was something I'd missed about hours and usage, but everything just pointed me to unlimited service. And, according to the Terms of Use, the owner breached his own part of the contract by suspending my account.

The owner and I have since traded some interesting emails and he offered to let me keep my email address for my troubles, as long as I don't use their dial-up service, and it would only cost me $3.95 a month. That would be taken off of the 6 months that I still have left of my yearly subscription. That sucks too...cause their mail server won't allow me to send mail while I'm connected to MSN or another dial-up service.

I just feel shafted about the whole thing. The company advertises unlimited dial-up and usage. In fact, the name of their company is "----- Unlimited". I think the owner is striding into false advertisement territory, and have told him as much. He gets defensive and tells me that's his right. Maybe so. I still think he's in the wrong.

*sigh*

Oh well, if anyone sent me an email to my regular email address and I haven't emailed you back, now you know why. I never got it and you're more than welcome to re-send. As of now, some of the messages that I send are still being delayed either by a couple of hours or even days. One of these days I'll get it all straightened out...one of these days I'll move to where there's DSL access. Woohoo!