Whatever you wanna do...

...don't do it with Wannadoo.

I've been a Wannadoo (Freeserve) customer now for about seven or eight years and never had a problem until now. When we moved into the house I had a second phone line fitted so, as a dialup user, I could surf the web without stopping the phone being used. Anyway, soon after we moved in I switched to broadband, so the second line wasn't really necessary, but we kept it on.

A couple of weeks ago, Lou was going through the bills when she came across one for BT which had the charge for the second line on it - it was about £8. "Why don't we get rid of the second line and save £90-odd per year?" she suggested. I agreed, and made the call to Wannadoo to have them change my details so that I now connected from the "house" number. With that, all hell broke loose.

After a £25 charge for the service, I was told that the change would take up to twenty days to go through, and when I eventually found that I couldn't connect I should plug my modem into the other phone socket, through which I should be able to connect. Only it didn't work like that. After a week I got an error message and a light flashed on my modem, so I swapped the socket and still had an error and a flashing light. So I rang Wannadoo. "Ah, it will actually take up to twenty days to connect you," they said. Well, I went nuts.

To be honest, I went nuts every time I phoned, usually launching into totally justifiable verbal abuse, until now, ten days after I was disconnected, they have reconnected me. Hurrah! So I now have two missions demanding my attention:

Mission 1: Get a refund for the ten days during which time I was unable to connect to the internet (apart from through dialup - thank you, Freenetname xxx) whilst still paying for my 512kb broadband service at the sum of £27.99 per month.

Mission 2: To change my ISP to Nildram.

So it's been a hell of a couple of weeks.

Other things...

Off to Hinckley on Monday to sit in on another VB.Net course. Things are happening at work which aren't exactly filling me with joy, but I'm working on other things which are potentially more fun. Had a meeting with a chap from Microsoft today and actually had my first glimpse of the CRM v2 GUI, which is *very* different and looks nice. It should be out Q1 2006 (don't know if it will still be called "CRM 2005" then.) I'm also doing more work directly for MS on CRM 1.2 and v2.

Some other things are happening too, but can't say any more.

The MP3 player I won from the Sunday Times finally arrived yesterday and it is completely excellent :-)

Also bought tickets for "Star Wars Episode 3 - The Revenge of the Sith"'s opening night at the Trafford Centre for Lou yesterday. She's chuffed.

Oh, and something has finally disloged "The Great Destroyer" by Low from the CD player in the car! I'm currently listening to "With Teeth" by Nine Inch Nails all the time. I didn't like it at first, but now I love it (apart from "Only", "Sunspots" and "With Teeth" - or should that be "Awitha Teetha"?)