Everything has a reason

Het is heel moeilijk te kiezen voor wie deze keer mijn stem krijgt.

De CD&V, daar ben ik nooit echt voor geweest. Bovendien hebben ze de laatste drie jaar bewezen dat ze sinds Dehaene niet meer weten wat gedaan. Akkoord, hij is serieus tegengewerkt, maar den Yves kan het echt niet. Ons Marianne waarschijnlijk wel, die is niet op haar mondje gevallen, dus daar heb ik voorlopig nog iets van vertrouwen in. Maar wanneer de CD&V zou winnen, blijven we in het sop zitten.

OpenVLD, wel, ik vind dat De Croo haar op z’n tanden heeft. Hij kan het uitleggen, hij daagt de rest uit en krijgt nooit een fatsoenlijk antwoord. “Laat dan zien he!” Hij doet het. En het kan me niet schelen of hij al dan niet door zijn vader wordt gestuurd, het is hij die er stáát. Van Quickenborne twittert en is dus sympathiek. Verhofstadt deed het goed, al hebben zij er wel alle reserves doorgejaagd die de regering Dehaene had opgespaard. Het kan zo niet blijven duren. Dus met OpenVLD verandert er ook juist niks.

Met NVA of Vlaams Belang zie ik wel iets veranderen, toch zeker met die laatsten. De NVA alleen kan wel roepen, maar echt iets realiseren, daar geloof ik niet in. De twee samen in een meerderheid en voor de rest niks van andere partijen, dat zou ook iets veranderen. Alleen zullen de Franstaligen weer constant NON zeggen en veto’s zitten stellen. Weer geen verandering dus. Bovendien betwijfel ik of ik de verandering zou goedvinden die zij zouden realiseren. En oh ja, Bart, “Yes we can?”. Echt gast, gekopiëerd en zwak en ongeloofwaardig. En zonder charisma van de uitvinder. Stop ermee.

Zelf zou ik nog op Groen! kunnen stemmen. Maar dan wel wanneer ze hun verantwoordelijk op zouden nemen. Een groener Vlaanderen, windmolens, hernieuwbare energie, milieuvriendelijke auto’s (echte, niet zoals de "groene" auto’s van tegenwoordig die nog steeds het milieu zwaar vermoorden), investeer daarin. Dat zie ik wel zitten. Maar wanneer ze zelfs bij kleine milieurampen hun verantwoordelijkheid niet willen opnemen en blijkt dat ze hun eigen centjes belangrijker vinden dan het milieu, wat heeft het dan voor zin om erop te stemmen?

Waarom zou ik niet op SP.A stemmen? Lekker anders. Nog nooit gedaan, nog nooit gedacht, maar volgens VTM’s Stem van Vlaanderen zou ik op Caroline Gennez moeten stemmen. Afin, de eerste keer toch. De tweede keer toverden ze een wit konijn uit hun hoed. Maar de zin om op Caroline te stemmen wordt me dan weer ontnomen door de loze beloftes die ze maken en de onrealistische idëen. Sympathiek, dat wel, maar pfft.

Lijst De Decker neem ik zelfs niet in overweging, laat staan één van die (extreem-) linkse partijen. Links staat voor extreme naïviteit en zware ondermijning van alles wat men in de Belgische geschiedenis met vaak letterlijk bloed, zweet en tranen heeft opgebouwd.

Eigenlijk blijft er alleen nog een blanco stem over, maar ook dan maak je niet het verschil. Behalve dan dat er bijna 2 euro minder budget is. Als iedereen dat zou doen, dan zouden de politiekers automatisch hun broeksriem moeten aanhalen – want DAT is eigenlijk wat er moet gebeuren. Geen extra belastingen, niet op de kop van de gewone mens, neen, snoeien in de regering. Maar ja, welke politieker wil nu zelf zijn royale loon willen afgeven?

Eén ding weet ik zeker. Op de goei stemmen doe ik deze keer zeker niet…

Voor die ene keer dat wij eens een overnachting boeken, zal ik me nu als een crimineel moeten verantwoorden, de bewijsstukken opsturen en vervolgens hopen dat de hoofdgriffier een beslissing neemt in mijn voordeel.

En dat terwijl de regeerders van dit land de wetten, die ze zelf hebben gemaakt, niet moeten naleven.

Since no payment has been received so far, all services related to this invoice will be removed from our servers and databases within 24 hours.
If the payment already has been executed, please fax us a proof of payment at +32 70 224 305 to avoid deletion.

The line was active for only 14 days.
I called to their 24/7 support. And this time, I would wait until at least somebody picks up that phone. An 8 minute call to a 0904… number – which will cost me about a fortune – and then they said “There’s nobody to answer this phone call, please try again later”. YEAH RIGHT.
I recorded the largest part of the call, but I only started recording after more than a minute and if you want to skip the terrible quality song, skip to 06:31. There they tell me they don’t answer.

Then I called my neighbours to ask whether they payed already. They did this morning. Shit. Now I can’t do anything more but fax Dommel. Problem: I don’t have a fax. I do have a Powerbook though and although I never used it, it should be able to fax. So I went to my neighbours house, made a fax in PDF, connected my Powerbook to their phone line, set up a fax (I’ve never faxed before) and tried to sent it. I guess that worked, I saw the dialing, connection being made, sending, and closing the line, all without any error. It did took a while to send.

I sent the fax through e-mail too, not that it will ever been read.

My story:

• January 5: request for an account. Payment done. Received mail that it could last 10 working days before the connection is active
• January 18: second invoice. No active Internet, so no payment
• January 23: start of an e-mail marathon: sent a mail to ask why there’s no connection yet. No answer received.
• January 25: second mail, this time not so friendly. Was answered: no payment is needed for the time that we’re waiting for the connection
• February 6: finally, the ADSL signal is active. Sent an e-mail to ask what to do with the invoice
• February 8: first reminder on the invoice. Called expensive 24/7 support: nobody answered. Sent another mail, to all known e-mail addresses. No answer came
• February 13: second payment reminder. Started to send e-mail to all known addresses to ask for an answer. Started blogging about it
• February 18: final payment reminder. Called daytime support: it took 10 minutes to answer my phone. Got an answer with which I’m not quite happy, but I ordered my neighbours to pay anyway.
• February 20. Deletion warning: within 24 hours, the account will be closed unless payment has been done and prove has been faxed. we don’t have a fax. Luckily, my Powerbook has one. Sent the fax as fax and as e-mail (including typos).

I’m sure they’re not going to contact me. I’m wondering whether they’re going to close the account or not.

There where I doubted once whether or not I would switch to Dommel, I now know for sure. I’M NOT.

More about Dommel…

As I promised, I started sending a mail every day until I got a response. Today, I got one.

Subject: final reminder: invoice #xxxxxx

Another try to call their expensive support and waiting until someone would pick up the phone…

It took them 10 minutes in which the same song kept repeating and not even a woman’s voice telling me to “hold on, your call is important to us”. Then somebody picked up the phone.

It seems the “compensation” isn’t calculated in money, they compensate it in days, so the validation of the invoice is prolonged. The validation period of the current pro-forma invoice is already longer (15th of March to 15th of April in stead of 5th) but because we had to wait one month, the next invoice has to be lengthened even more. This means, the next invoice will be valid from 5th of May until 5th of June – at least, that’s what the guy has promised me.

BUT the next invoice will already arrive 18th of March and has to be payed before 8th of April.

You see? April 8, the payment for May will have to be done.
WTF??

And what when we decide to cancel the account, will it last for one month more? I told them to send us the new invoice only on April 18, but I got the answer that this is impossible since the invoices are generated automatically. That is a story everyone likes to say: “Don’t blame me, it’s the computer”.

Well, REPROGRAM THE THING, a computer can be manipulated BY DEFINITION.

I told my neighbours to pay anyway and to see what the next month will give. I wouldn’t like to see their account being cancelled. Perhaps when we switch from invoices on a monthly base to invoices on a three monthly base, the invoices period will be reset? I don’t know. We’ll see.

If only you depend on somebody else…

More about Dommel…

On my advice, neighbours who were still surfing the Internet using dial-up, have chosen for Dommel as provider. On what I read on their site and what I heard from colleagues and friends, they’re the best choice and the cheapest for what you get.

So we registered, we signed the papers, we payed for the first month (20 euro activation + 29 euro for the first month). And then we waited… And waited… and waited even more. Until we were tired of waiting for about a month and still no ADSL was available on their phone line. I mailed back at Dommel, but got no responses. Just an auto-generated response telling they got my e-mail and have made a support ticket for it. After even more waiting, we got a second pro-forma invoice, which was required to be payed within 3 weeks, or the Internet account would be terminated

At that point, I first made a call to their (really expensive) 24/7 support line. I waited three minutes. Nobody picked up – except of course the computer which caused the line to be open so that it could be billed on my neighbours account. I dropped the call and I sent a somewhat spicy mail to all the e-mail addresses I could find, asking what they were doing and we were absolutely not going to pay this second invoice.
The next day, I finally got a human response, telling they got the signed contract and they would start the activation of the ADSL signal on the phone line. Great. They also assured we didn’t have to pay for the time waiting on the ADSL signal.

After waiting even more, 32 days after the payment, the ADSL signal was finally active. I sent an e-mail to Dommel, telling everything worked fine, but asking what to do with the second invoice. Since we already payed for one month Internet and we didn’t get it, we assume the payment is for February and thus we’re not planning to pay the second invoice.

No response came, but two days later we got a first payment reminder. If we wouldn’t pay the open invoice, the Internet account would be terminated. It only exists for two days!. I sent a mail back asking what they were up to. No answer came.

Four days later, I resent the mail to all the addresses I know. Now I got a new support ticket (actually, I got two) in an automatic e-mail, telling they would respond within 5 working days.

Two days later – today – I received a second reminder to pay the invoice. This is the point where even I loose my patience. I resent the mail from two days ago, two times (one for each support ticket) to all e-mail addresses I know. Secondly, I did the same as reply on the second payment reminder, for both support tickets, again to all e-mail addresses I know.

Given that I know 3 e-mail addresses for Dommel, this results in 12 e-mails I sent today + one telling “you’re joking, right?” as direct answer on the second payment reminder.

I also told them I am going to sent a new e-mail every day, until they finally decide to answer me. Until then, I suggest my neighbours not to pay.

Belgacom ADSL is more expensive, but I doubt they cause so much troubles. I was thinking of switching to Dommel myself, but given this knowledge, I stick with Telenet, not that much troubles so far…

To be continued…