Kemstone's Journal

My supplier has cut me off. As of now, I can’t access the internet from my apartment. If I want to use the internet, I have to go to a café or to the Planeo office. Right now I’m at Planeo because it’s infinity percent cheaper.

Once upon a time, I had internet service that I never had to worry about. All payments were automatically deducted from my account, and I’d get e-mail every month from O2 merely telling me the amount of the bill. A couple of months ago I started noticing the amount of the bill getting higher and higher, to the point of absurdity. Was I downloading a lot more? Am I being charged by how much I use the internet? I definitely use it a lot.

But a warning letter from O2 cleared things up, and I found that the bills had just been piling up because payments were, for some reason, no longer being deducted automatically. Rather than go to an O2 service location and deal with figuring out the problem, I just manually made the payment, and did so again the following month—which is this month.

A few weeks ago, however, I got another bill from a company called “Inkasso” that I didn’t know anything about. It seemed to have something to do with O2, but I didn’t pay it because I’d just paid my O2 bill and it didn’t make sense that some other company would charge me for something I already paid for.

Apparently that was a mistake. I should have just paid the 33 euros, whatever it was for, because apparently Inkasso was going to cut off my internet service if I didn’t pay. They decided to do this at the most convenient possible time—Saturday morning.

Yes, Saturday morning. The longest possible time before the banks would be operating again, as in Germany they and most other business close down for the entire weekend.

It was a long process before I even figured out that the Inkasso thing was the problem. I called tech support and found out there was an issue with a bill but he’d have to have someone else call me, then I went to an O2 service location and after a long process of trying to figure out what was wrong the girl there informed me I needed to pay Inkasso but the situation wouldn’t be able to get resolved until the middle of the week. Apparently no one can just flick a switch and turn my internet back on. The bank has to contact Inkasso, Inkasso has to contact O2, and O2 has to flick the switch. In Germany all of this will apparently take several days, and the ball won’t even begin to get rolling until Monday at the earliest. Wahoo.

Not that it’s too much of an inconvenience. I only spend about a third of my life online. For the next few days it’ll have to be reduced to less than 5%. No big deal. It’ll be a nice opportunity to change up the routine, and I’ll appreciate having the internet at home all the more when I get it back, which hopefully won’t take months.

This will, however, make my resolve to put up at least one blog post a day much more difficult. Luckily I don’t have all that much I want to blog about. I was going to comment on the Sarah Palin / Mosque at Ground Zero thing, but I’ll save that for tomorrow and make this today’s contribution. Sorry it’s such a lame one.