Revenge, Served Cold

In what I can only presume is some perverse form of revenge for revealing voice mail secrets on my blog, T-Com, the phone company, has managed to get its revenge.

My phone service and DSL was cut off today.

Kind of frustrating, I first started noticing problems last night at about 6:30, whilst I was in the middle of troubleshooting somebody else’s problem—and bam, the Internet was down. I gave up on it over night, but then, like a cheap tease, it was working this morning when I woke up, so I presumed that it had been fixed.

Until I got home from the office, tried to connected, and realized it was down.

It took me awhile, for I did some minor crap on my laptop before it occurred to me that although the Internet was down, I could make some phone calls. At that point I confidently punched in the phone number for somebody in the United States, hit dial and listened to the phone dial. It was at this point that it occurred to me that I couldn’t remember having heard the dial tone.

The phone was broken as well.

Thank god for my wonderful colleagues, one of whom, although celebrating his first attempt to sell something on eBay, took the time to call T-Com twice. Twice because I gave him the wrong customer number the first time (I have two numbers, one for the phone service and one for the Internet access). After the second phone call, he called me back with good news and bad news.

The bad news is that I cannot get my phone service back today—it seems that while T-Com was connecting some other customer to the grid they cut my service off. There’s no way to correct this mistake today, my service will be restored sometime tomorrow.

As for the good news, I cannot actually remember what it was—presumably that my service wasn’t disconnected due to something like an unpaid bill.

This has forced me out of the house and to the ACC, one of the few spots in Weimar that offers free WiFi to its customers. This is actually my first visit to the ACC and I am enjoying a “Fladenbrotecken mit Zeigkäase, Oliven und Rucola überbacken.” This is helpfully translated on the menu as “unleavened bread with goat cheese, olives and arugula.” I’m not quite sure what arugula is, and the bread is certainly not unleavened (it is, relatively speaking, flat); but it is quite tasty.

Not having DSL at home has set me behind on South African trip planning. I was hoping to book a room at some inn in Cape Town tonight, but instead I found myself on the streets of Weimar enjoying the setting sun as I made my way to this nice café.

Perhaps T-Com should rethink its revenge. I’m kind of liking it.